wpvppBHqpfpnanim 


IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS 
OF 

NAPOLEON 


JAMES  MORGAN 


te,  ^V. 


^-^ 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 

GIFT  OF 


Col.  Arnold  VJ.  Shutter 


IN   THE  FOOTSTEPS   OF   NAPOLEON: 
HIS  LIFE  AND  ITS  FAMOUS  SCENES 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

HBW  YORK  •    BOSTON   •    CHICAGO  •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA  •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •  BOMBAY  •  CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


Napoleon  as  General-in-Chief  of  the  Army  of  Italy,  by  G.  Levy 


IN  THE 

FOOTSTEPS  OF 

NAPOLEON 

HIS  LIFE  AND 
ITS  FAMOUS  SCENES 


BY 

JAMES  MORGAN 

AUTHOR  OF  "ABRAHAM  LINCOLN.  THE 
BOY  AND  THE  MAN."  ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 


mew  l^orh 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1915 

All  rights  reserved 


M61 


Copyright,  191 1  and  1915 
By  JAMES  MORGAN 

Copyright,   1915 

By  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Set  up  and  electrotyped.      Published,  September,  1915 


V 


To  the 
Dear  Memory  of  a  Friend, 

EDWARD  FRANCIS  BURNS, 

1859-1914, 

who  proposed  my  journey 
in  the  path  of  Napoleon 


THE  AUTHOR'S  FOREWORD 

Before  writing  this  biography  of  Napoleon,  I  made  a  jour- 
ney of  nearly  twenty  thousand  miles  to  the  famous  scenes  in  his 
life  and  along  the  line  of  his  celebrated  marches.  The  drama 
of  history  is  as  much  entitled  to  its  proper  stage  setting  as  the 
plays  of  the  theatre,  and  my  aim  has  been  to  see  and  portray 
the  man  in  his  various  backgrounds,  to  bring  closer  his  habita- 
tions and  battlefields,  to  simplify  the  geography  of  his  cam- 
paigns. 

It  chanced  that  on  the  eve  of  the  War  of  the  Nations,  my 
errand  took  me  from  Corsica  through  France  and  Italy  to 
Egypt,  the  Holy  Land,  and  Syria ;  over  the  Alps  and  through 
Austria,  Germany,  and  Poland  into  Russia,  and  finally  to 
Elba  and  Waterloo.  The  Russians  and  Germans  had  only 
lately  commemorated  their  liberation  from  Napoleon's  empire, 
and  the  British  and  other  peoples  were  preparing  to  celebrate 
the  centennial  of  his  final  overthrow  at  Waterloo,  when  an- 
other great  European  war  suddenly  burst  upon  the  same  fields 
where  the  same  powers  had  struggled  for  mastery  100  years 
before. 

The  War  of  the  Nations  is  the  tragic  sequel  of  the  Na- 
poleonic wars.  Some  of  the  parties  may  have  changed  sides 
for  the  moment;  but  in  their  motives  and  their  strategy,  the 
two  wars  are  strangely  alike,  and  I  have  depicted  the  earlier 
as  the  forerunner  of  this  later  conflict. 

The  centenary  of  Napoleon's  downfall,  moreover,  seems  to 
offer  an  appropriate  occasion  for  telling  again  the  story  that 
never  grows  old,  and  for  telling  it  in  the  light  of  our  own 
times.  An  effort  has  been  made,  therefore,  to  find  in  his  rise 
and  fall  something  more  than  the  miraculous  vicissitudes  of 
a  legendary  superman,  or  the  meaningless  sport  of  blind  for- 
tune.    I  have  tried  to  present  him  simply  as  a  man  of  the 


THE  AUTHOR'S  FOREWORD 

people  who,  in  a  period  of  chaos,  was  called  out  of  the  crowd 
to  embody  and  vindicate  the  race  of  common  men  against  the 
privileged  few,  to  sweep  away  ancient  systems  and  wrongs, 
and,  as  the  incarnation  of  the  Great  Revolution,  to  be  en- 
throned above  monarchs  of  long  descent.  In  short,  I  have 
represented  him  as  the  servant  of  a  mighty  power  not  of  him- 
self 

that  o'er  him  planned 

and  which,  with  the  pitilessness  of  nature,  east  him  away 
when,  blinded  by  personal  ambition,  he  was  no  longer  faithful 
and  useful  to  its  purpose.  This  is  the  Napoleon  who,  after 
the  lapse  of  a  century,  retains  his  dominion  over  the  imagina- 
tion of  the  world,  supreme  in  the  admiration  and  the  disap- 
pointment, in  the  applause  and  reproach  of  men. 


Since  my  wife  shared  my  travels  and  my  labours  in  the 
preparation  of  this  volume,  I  hope  I  may  be  permitted  grate- 
fully to  acknowledge  her  joint  authorship. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTEE  PAGE 

I    Birth  and  Birthplace 3 

II    Schooldays    in    France 13 

III  Before  the  Dawn 22 

IV  The  Man  on  Horseback 31 

V    A  Love  Story 38- 

VI    The   Little    Corporal 46 

VII    In  the  Cockpit  of  Europe 52 

VIII    Conquering  Austria 60 

IX    Nations  at  the  Feet  of  a  Youth 65 

X    The  Descent  upon  Egypt 73 

XI    The  Battle  of  the  Pyramids 82 

XII    Into  the  Holy  Land 91 

XIII  His  First  Retreat 100 

XIV  Ruler  of  France 110 

XV    Crossing  the  Alps 118 

XVI    IVIarengo  Lost  and  Won 127 

XVII    The  Law  Giver 135 

XVIII    Selling  Louisiana 143 

XIX    A  Day  at  Malmaison 147" 

XX    How  THE  Republic  Died 159 

XXI    Twice  Crowned 167 

XXII    The  Unconquered  Sea 178 

XXIII  The  Fall  of  Vienna 184 

XXIV  The  Sun  of  Austerlitz 193 

XXV    The  Matchmaker 206 

XXVI    The  Kingmaker 213 

XXVII    Crushing  Prussia 218 

XXVIII    Eylau  and  Friedland 226 

XXIX    At  Tilsit 238 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTEE  PAGE 

XXX    Napoleon's  Marshals 247 

XXXI    Victories  of  Peace 252 

XXXII    Fortune  Turns 264 

XXXIII  His  Last  Victory 272 

XXXIV  The  Unconquered  Sex 282 

XXXV    The  Divorce 292 

XXXVI    The  Second  Marriage 301 

XXXVII    The  King  of  Rome 310 

XXXVIII    A  World  at  War 320 

XXXIX    On  to  Moscow 329 

XL  The  Torch  That  Fired  the  World     ....  339 

XLI    The  Great  Tragedy 350 

XLII    The  Rising  of  the  Peoples 361 

XLIII    The  Battle  of  the  Nations 369 

XLIV    At  Bay 382 

XLV    The  First  Abdication 392 

XLVI    Emperor  of  Elba 402 

XLVII    The  Return  from  Elba 413 

XLVIII    The  Hundred  Days 425 

XLIX    Waterloo 433 

L    The  Captive  Eagle 448 

LI     St.  Helena 458 

LII    L'Aiglon  and  the  Bonapartes 473 

Lill    Across  a  Century 485 

Chronology  of  Napoleon's  Life 495 

Index 505 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Napoleon,  as  General-in-Chief  of  the  Army  of  Italy,  by   G. 

Levy Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Napoleon's  Mother  and  his  Birthplace 6 

Statue  of  Napoleon,  the  Schoolboy,  and  the  Gate  of  his  old 

School  at  Brienne  le  Chateau 16 

An  Early  Portrait  of  Napoleon,  by  Bailly 34 

Josephine,  by  Prud'hon 40 

The  Little  Corporal  at  the  Bridge  of  Lodi,  and  With  Josephine 

at  a  Fete  in  Milan 62 

At  the  Fete  of  Mahomet  in  Cairo 84 

In  the  Saddle,  by  Bellange 114 

Welcomed  by  the  Monks  of  St.  Bernard 120 

Napoleon  with  his  nephews  and  nieces,  by  Ducis 144 

Napoleon  Crowning  Josephine,  by  David 170 

The  Emperor  in  the  Midst  of  his  New  Aristocracy     ....  180 

At  Austerlitz,  by  Gerard 198 

The  Emperor  and  Empress  at  the  Marriage  of  Jerome  Bona- 
parte to  the  Princess  Catherine,  by  Regnault 208 

Princes  of  the  New  Imperial  Family 214 

The   Conqueror,   by  Meissonier,  with   his   Hat   and   his   Camp 

Washstand 220 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING 
PAGE 


The  Emperor  of  the  West  and  the  Emperor  of  the  East  Meet- 
ing on  the  Raft  at  Tilsit,  and  Napoleon  Greeting  Queen 
Louise  of  Prussia 240 

Some  Portraits  of  the  Emperor 254 

Some  Napoleonic  Autographs 258 

Women  of  the  Imperial  Family 286 

The  Divorce  of  Josephine,  by  Sartain 296 

Marie  Louise  and  the  King  of  Rome,  by  Gerard 304 

Napoleon  and  his  Son,  by  Steuben 314 

"Bad  News  from  France,"  by  Verestehagin   .....".  342 

In  Retreat 364 

The  Adieu  to  the  Guard  at  Fontainebleau 396 

The  Fallen  Monarch,  and  his  Elban  Retreat 406 

Waterloo,  by  Steuben 440 

On  the  Bellerophon,  by  Orchardson 452 

Longwood,  and  the  Nameless  Grave  at  St.  Helena     ....  462 

The  Last  Days  of  Napoleon,  by  Vela,  and  the  Camp  Bed  on 

which  he  died 468 

Two  Portraits  of  Napoleon  at  St.  Helena 478 

The  Hotel  des  Invalides  at  Paris,  and  the  Tomb  of  Napoleon   .  488 


IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON: 
HIS  LIFE  AND  ITS  FAMOUS  SCENES 


IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF 
NAPOLEON 


CHAPTER  I 

BIRTH  AND  BIRTHPLACE 

BORN  AUGUST   15,   1769 

THE  strange,  eventful  history  of  Napoleon,  the  strangest 
and  most  eventful  in  human  story,  must  forever  start 
at  Ajaccio,  the  quaint,  out-of-the-world  capital  of 
Corsica. 

Sailing  out  of  the  Mediterranean  into  the  Bay  of  Ajaccio, 
between  Capo  di  Muro  and  the  blood  red  lies  Sanguinaires, 
the  eye  of  a  traveller  is  enchanted  by  a  scene  of  beauty  prob- 
ably unsurpassed  in  all  those  waters  except  by  the  larger  and 
grander  Bay  of  Naples.  Behind  its  hoary  grey  citadel,  the 
town  glistens  like  a  white  city  where  the  green  slopes  of  snow- 
capped Monte  d'Oro  come  down  from  the  blue  sky  to  meet  the 
blue  sea. 

The  fast  little  steamer,  which  makes  the  210  mile  voyage 
from  Marseilles  in  about  12  hours  and  the  150  mile  journey 
from  Nice  in  nine,  ties  up  side-on  to  a  stone  dock,  where  the 
passengers  step  ashore  as  from  a  train  at  a  railway  station  and 
are  at  once  in  "la  cite  Napoleonienne, "  with  mementoes  of 
the  immortal  Ajaccian  on  every  side. 

Tall  palms  at  the  end  of  the  quay  surround  a  wide,  shady 
square  which  opens  the  way  up  town.  At  the  top  of  this 
short  Place  des  Palmiers  a  street  leads  into  the  older  town 
back  of  the  citadel.  It  is  the  Rue  Napoleon.  Three  streets 
on  the  right  from  this  is  the  narrow,  almost  sunless  Rue  St. 

3 


4  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Charles,  and  there  at  the  end  of  the  first  block  stands  a  four 
story,  square  stone  house  at  the  comer  of  a  still  narrower 
street.  Above  the  door  there  is  a  marble  tablet  with  this  in- 
scription in  French: 

Napoleon 

was  bom  in  this  house 

Au^st  15,  1769 

On  that  August  15th,  the  Feast  of  the  Assumption,  ever  the 
greatest  day  in  the  religious  calendar  for  the  Corsicans,  was 
being  celebrated  in  Ajaccio.  The  little  town  had  given  itself 
over  to  the  holiday  and  the  country  people  had  been  swarming 
in  afoot  and  on  mule  back  since  early  morning.  The  bells  were 
ringing,  the  houses  were  green  with  boughs  and  the  cathedral 
altar  was  abloom  with  wild  flowers  from  the  mountain  side. 

In  the  middle  of  the  forenoon  the  beautiful  young  Signora 
Bonaparte — a  girl  of  nineteen — leading  by  the  hand  her  six- 
year-old  half-brother,  Joseph  Fesch,  and  followed  by  her  hus- 
band's uncle,  Luciano,  and  her  husband's  sister-in-law,  Gel- 
truda  Paravacini,  came  out  of  that  front  door  over  w^hich  the 
tablet  now  rests  and  made  her  way  down  the  street  two  blocks 
to  the  cathedral.  While  she  was  among  the  kneeling  wor- 
shippers at  the  mass,  she  received  the  painful  warnings  of 
maternity.  Calling  for  the  aid  of  her  companion,  she  was 
assisted  to  her  feet  and  led  out  of  the  crowded  church  to  her 
home.  There  she  sank  upon  a  sofa  and,  at  eleven  o'clock  in 
the  morning.  Napoleon  entered  the  world. 

No  physician  had  been  summoned.  No  midwife  was  in  at- 
tendance, and  that  office  was  fulfilled  by  Signora  Paravacini, 
aided  by  the  maid  of  all  work,  Mammucia  Caterina,  for  his- 
tory has  treasured  all  this  time  every  name  connected  with  the 
opening  scene  in  the  great  drama. 

There  was,  moreover,  a  stirring  prologue  to  this  drama  some 
fifty  miles  away  in  the  wild  heart  of  the  then  half-barbarous 
island,  and  the  savage  Corsican  mountains  are  the  first  back- 
ground in  the  life  of  Napoleon.  His  prenatal  environment 
appropriately  was  a  scene  of  war,  crowded  with  moving  acci- 
dents by  flood  and  field.     For  forty  years  a  primitive  and 


BIRTH  AND  BIRTHPLACE  5 

liberty  loving  people,  only  160,000  in  all,  Italian  in  speech  and 
by  tradition  but  Corsicans  at  heart,  had  been  struggling  for 
their  independence,  first  against  the  rich  republic  of  Genoa  and 
at  last  against  the  great  kingdom  of  France,  to  which  the 
Genoese  had  pawned  the  sovereignty  of  Corsica,  with  its  less 
than  4000  square  miles  of  wild  mountains  and  fruitful  valleys. 

Ajaccio  being  a  seaport,  the  French  invader  had  readily 
captured  it,  and  the  patriotic  Bonapartes,  men  and  women 
together,  fled  the  town  to  join  the  patriot  army,  where  Signora 
Bonaparte 's  husband  was  the  secretary  of  Paoli,  the  Corsican 
general-in-chief.  A  year  and  a  half  before  the  date  on  the 
tablet  the  signora  had  taken  refuge  in  an  old  house  in  the  little 
mountain  town  of  Corte,  then  the  capital,  where  she  gave  birth 
to  a  son.  The  house  stands  to  this  day,  and  inscribed  amid  the 
many  battle  scars  on  its  walls  is  the  announcement  that  it  is 
the  birthplace  of  King  Joseph  Bonaparte  of  Spain. 

The  next  year,  when  the  despairing  band  of  Corsicans  was 
making  its  last  stand  before  the  guns  of  Louis  XV,  the  brave 
young  mother  was  the  companion  of  her  husband  in  the  field. 
Holding  her  baby  boy,  Joseph,  in  one  arm,  she  drove  her 
saddle  mule  with  her  free  hand,  while,  as  she  said,  "under 
my  heart  I  carried  my  Napoleon,  with  the  same  calm  pleasure 
that  I  felt  afterward  when  I  held  him  in  my  arms  and  fed  him 
at  my  breast.  ...  I  heard  the  balls  whistling  round  my  ears, 
without  a  shadow  of  fear,  as  I  trusted  to  the  protection  of  the 
Holy  Virgin. ' ' 

Often  the  expectant  mother  slept  in  the  open  in  the  midst  of 
the  soldiers.  On  the  long,  swift  marches  up  and  down  and 
around  the  rugged  mountains  she  rode  beside  or  behind  her 
husband  and  sometimes  was  obliged  to  trudge  afoot  with  the 
hunted  army,  pursued  everywhere  by  overwhelming  forces. 
In  next  the  last  battle  she  was  present  on  the  field,  and  after 
the  final  crushing  defeat  was  among  those  who  fled  from  the 
conquering  French  and  hid  in  the  fugitives'  grotto,  which  is 
still  shown  in  a  wilderness  of  granite  far  up  the  side  of  jMonte 
Rotondo. 

Some  three  hundred  Corsicans,  who  were  determined  never 
to  wear  the  yoke  of  the  French,  gathered  around  their  General- 


6      IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in-chief  and  sailed  away  on  an  exile  to  England.  Signora 
Bonaparte's  husband  was  eager  to  go  with  them.  But  for  the 
objections  of  the  wife,  who  was  to  be  a  mother  again  in  three 
months,  London  and  not  Ajaccio  would  have  been  the  birth- 
place of  Napoleon  and  he  would  have  become  perhaps  a  British 
soldier.  Yielding  to  her  counsels,  the  husband  decided  to  re- 
main in  the  island  and  he  took  the  lead  in  making  peace  with 
the  French  commander. 

The  subjugation  of  Corsica  was  complete — and  France  had 
annexed  Napoleon  Bonaparte ! 

A  bride  before  she  was  fourteen,  Letizia  was  nineteen  at  the 
birth  of  Napoleon,  who  was  her  fourth  child.  The  first  two 
having  failed  to  lay  hold  on  life,  and  remembering  that  sad 
experience  and  her  recent  struggles  and  privations  with  the 
army  in  the  field,  there  was  a  natural  anxiety  about  the  new- 
comer. She  nursed  him  while  she  could  and  then  her  place 
was  taken  by  a  sailor's  wife,  Camilla  Ilari,  another  name  im- 
mortalised by  association  with  this  infant,  her  ' '  Nabulionello, ' ' 
as  the  good  woman  fondly  called  her  charge. 

In  a  land  of  lovely  women,  Letizia  had  worn  from  girlhood 
the  challenging  title  of  the  "most  beautiful  woman  in  Cor- 
sica." According  to  the  standards  of  a  race  of  low  stature, 
she  was  of  medium  height  and  of  graceful  carriage,  with  the 
small  hands  and  feet  and  ears,  the  regular  teeth,  the  chestnut 
hair,  the  noble  forehead,  the  brilliant  eyes,  the  long,  well- 
formed  nose,  the  fine  mouth  and  strong  chin  which  Napoleon 
was  to  inherit  as  he  developed  into  manhood.  It  is  certain, 
however,  that  he  was  not  hailed  as  a  pretty  baby  or  one  worthy 
of  a  beautiful  mother  and  a  handsome  father,  and  for  a  long 
time  the  family  was  troubled  because  his  big  head  was  so  out  of 
proportion  to  his  really  frail  body. 

Napoleon,  as  well  as  his  mother,  testified  that  he  was  a  wild, 
unruly  boy,  whose  inseparable  companion  was  no  other  than 
his  foster  brother,  his  "brother  of  the  milk,"  Ignazio  Ilari,  the 
son  of  a  sailor  and  a  nurse.  Long  years  afterward,  when  he 
sat  down  on  another  island  to  gaze  across  the  gulf  of  a  life- 
time, and  this  island  of  Corsica  swam  into  view,  he  said  of  his 
childhood : 


'A 


BIRTH  AND  BIRTHPLACE  7 

"I  was  self-willed  and  obstinate;  nothing  awed  me;  nothing 
disconcerted  me.  I  was  quarrelsome,  exasperating;  I  feared 
no  one.  I  gave  a  blow  here  and  a  scratch  there.  Every  one 
was  afraid  of  me.  My  brother,  Joseph,  was  the  one  with  whom 
I  had  the  most  to  do;  he  was  beaten,  bitten,  scolded.  I  had 
put  the  blame  on  him  almost  before  he  knew  what  he  was 
about,  was  telling  tales  about  him  almost  before  he  could  col- 
lect his  wits.  I  had  to  be  quick.  My  mamma,  Letizia,  would 
have  restrained  my  warlike  temper ;  she  would  not  have  put 
up  with  my  defiant  petulance.  Her  tenderness  was  severe, 
meting  out  punishment  and  reward  with  equal  justice ;  merit 
and  demerit,  she  took  both  into  account." 

The  rod  was  not  spared  by  the  stern  and  exacting  mother. 
A  cuff  or  two  on  the  ear  were  sometimes  required  to  get  the 
boy  started  to  church  even  on  Sunday.  When  he  persisted 
one  day  in  following  his  mother  against  her  orders,  she  turned 
and  calmly  gave  him  such  a  vigorous  slap  that  he  rolled  down 
a  hill,  where  she  left  him  to  pick  himself  up  while  she  went 
on  her  way  without  looking  back.  Even  when  the  time  came 
for  him  to  flatter  himself  that  he  was  "too  big  to  be  whipped," 
he  learned  his  mistake.  Because  his  old  grandmother  walked 
with  a  cane  he  called  her  a  witch  in  spite  of  all  her  pampering 
of  him.  The  mother  simply  waited  until  he  was  changing  his 
clothes  for  dinner,  in  expectation  of  guests,  and  catching  him 
out  of  his  armour,  gave  him  one  more  and  his  last  parental 
chastisement. 

To  an  American  seeking  dramatic  effects  in  the  plebeian 
origin  of  the  Emperor,  his  birthplace  is  a  disappointment.  It 
is  too  large  and  too  nearly  palatial  for  the  purpose  of  contrast. 
While  Napoleon  was  a  parvenu  among  kings,  he  was  an  aristo- 
crat among  Corsicans  and  belonged  to  one  of  the  first  families 
of  Ajaccio.  His  father  was  "the  noble  Signor  Carlo  di  Buona- 
parte" in  the  record  of  his  marriage,  and  by  the  same  evidence 
his  mother  the  daughter  of  "the  noble  Signor  Jean  Jerome 
Ramolino. ' ' 

The  old  family  mansion  at  Ajaccio  has  hardly  been  occupied 
since  the  Bonapartes  were  banished  from  Corsica — to  fame  and 
fortune.     Napoleon's  mother  willed  it  to  the  King  of  Rome, 


8  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

but  she  outlived  the  King,  and  at  her  death  it  came  into  the 
possession  of  King  Joseph  Bonaparte.  Now  it  is  the  property 
of  the  ex-Empress  Eugenie.  Across  the  street,  is  the  tiny 
Place  Letizia,  where  once  stood  the  girlhood  home  of  the 
mother,  the  site  of  which  Eugenie  has  bought  and  sown  with 
flower  seed. 

On  the  second  floor  of  the  Bonaparte  home,  joining  the  salon 
de  visite  where  the  inevitable  register  now  awaits  the  tourist's 
autograph,  is  a  large  chamber  with  one  window  overlooking 
the  side  street.  This  is  the  veritable  shrine  of  the  temple — 
the  room  in  which  Napoleon  was  born.  The  low,  narrow  sofa 
on  which  the  young  mother  lay  in  the  clothes  she  had  worn  at 
church  still  stands  against  the  wall. 

There  is  little  in  the  birthroom  now  except  memories,  but 
they  crowd  it.  A  Bible  scene  is  there,  carved  in  wood,  a  gift 
that  Napoleon  brought  his  mother  when  he  came  home  for  the 
last  time  after  his  Egyptian  campaign.  A  bust  of  Eugenie's 
Prince  Imperial  is  on  the  mantel  where  she  placed  it  with  her 
own  hands  when  she  was  Empress  of  the  French. 

On  the  wall  above  the  sofa  is  a  simple  engraving  in  a  cheap 
frame.  It  is  a  picture  of  the  child  grown  to  young  manhood 
but  still  looking  very  boyish,  the  "Little  Corporal"  waving 
the  tricolour  flag  of  France  on  the  bridge  of  Arcole.  It  is  like 
a  picture  of  him  at  play  and  in  keeping  with  the  scenes  of  his 
youth,  where  on  the  red  tiled  floor  he  stamped  about,  a  wooden 
sword  on  his  thigh. 

The  house  as  a  whole  is  now  scantily  furnished,  but  the  birth 
chamber  and  its  sofa,  the  veritable  nest  in  which  the  eagle  was 
hatched,  is  enough  for  the  most  eager  pilgrim,  and  this,  with 
the  house  itself,  should  appease  the  greediest  curiosity.  Then 
there  is  Napoleon's  back  bedroom,  where  the  boy's  wild  dreams 
did  not  equal  the  realities  of  the  life  ahead  of  him.  Moreover, 
this  room  has  a  trap  door,  and  the  trap  door  has  a  legend  of 
young  Napoleon  dropping  through  it  to  escape  from  pursuing 
enemies  in  the  Revolution. 

If  the  largeness  of  the  exterior  takes  the  visitor  by  surprise, 
he  will  be  astonished  by  the  imposing  interiors  of  the  house, 
the  drawing  room,  the  dining  room,  the  smoking  room,  and  the 


BIRTH  AND  BIRTHPLACE  9 

cabinet  or  study  of  the  father,  all  with  their  mantels  of  Car- 
rara marble.  The  grand  drawing  room,  the  salon  des  fetes,  its 
floor  of  shining  parquetry  ready  for  a  ball  and  its  walls  hung 
with  mirrors  and  candelabra,  suggests  the  labours  of  a  restorer, 
for  when  Napoleon  early  in  his  fortunes  ordered  the  old  home 
repaired,  Joseph,  to  whom  the  duty  was  intrusted,  is  said  to 
have  touched  up  and  embellished  the  ancestral  background  of 
the  newly  arisen  family. 

However  that  may  be,  a  sympathetic  observer,  with  a  mind 
for  practical  things,  cannot  but  be  sorry  as  he  wanders  from 
room  to  room,  each  opening  from  the  other,  to  think  of  poor 
Letizia  taking  care  of  this  big  house  and  her  eight  children 
with  only  one  servant  to  help  her ! 

Among  the  rare  keepsakes  of  the  birthplace  is  the  book  of 
ritual  which  the  priest,  who  was  a  Corsican,  employed  when 
he  prepared  Napoleon  for  death  at  St.  Helena.  Perhaps  the 
richest  treasure  of  all,  which  is  kept  in  the  house  of  the  cus- 
todian, is  a  laurel  wreath  or  crown  of  gold,  costing  $7000, 
which  some  enthusiasts  ordered  for  the  centenarj^  of  the  Con- 
sulate when  it  was  celebrated  in  1902. 

Everywhere  Ajaccio  echoes  the  memories  of  her  greatest  son. 
The  very  dock  at  which  the  steamer  lands  is  the  Quay  Na- 
poleon, and  bending  down  to  the  shore  from  a  terraced  height 
runs  the  Boulevard  du  Roi  Jerome,  recalling  the  youngest 
brother  of  Napoleon.  Farther  up  the  leafy  Place  of  Palms, 
where  the  flowing  water  ripples  in  a  fountain,  rises  a  white 
marble  statue  of  the  First  Consul,  sheeted  like  a  Roman  and 
with  a  rudder  in  his  right  hand.  Although  he  followed  his 
star  by  land  and  not  by  water,  the  Ajaccian  naturally  thinks 
of  his  immortal  fellow  islander  as  at  the  helm. 

Behind  the  back  of  that  marble  effigy,  the  shady  square 
comes  to  an  end.  Or  rather  it  merely  narrows  into  the  still 
spacious  Avenue  du  Premier  Consul,  lined  by  more  palms,  and 
continues  straight  on  for  two  blocks  where  it  is  intersected  by 
the  Rue  Bonaparte  and  by  the  most  important  street  in  town, 
the  Cours  Napoleon,  along  which  the  throngs  saunter  beneath 
the  wide-spreading  orange  trees. 

From  the  Rue  Bonaparte,  the  Rue  du  Roi  de  Rome  winds  its 


10  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

way  to  the  old  cathedral,  built  before  1600,  and  where  Na- 
poleon's parents  were  married  with  all  possible  pomp.  At  the 
right  of  the  door  stands  the  baptismal  font,  surmounted  now 
by  an  elaborately  carved  bronze  canopy  with  a  crown  at  the 
top.  Under  the  crown, ' '  The  glory  of  God  and  the  glory  of  the 
world"  is  engraved  with  the  names  of  the  Bonaparte  princes 
and  princesses  who  were  baptised  by  the  priests  of  the  cathe- 
dral. But  the  most  conspicuous  object  is  a  red  marble  tablet 
on  a  pillar  whereon  in  letters  of  gold  are  these  words  at- 
tributed to  Napoleon's  will: 

If  my  corpse  should  be  proscribed  iu  Paris  as  I  have  been,  I  wish 
to  be  buried  among  my  ancestors  in  the  cathedral  of  Ajaceio  in  Cor- 
sica. 

This  modest  plain  old  village  church  well  may  boast,  there- 
fore, that  it  stood  only  second  to  the  magnificent  Hotel  des 
Invalides  in  the  choice  of  the  imperial  exile.  How  nearly  it 
came  to  being  both  the  burial  place  and  the  birthplace  of 
Napoleon ! 

If  Ajaceio,  however,  is  not  the  sepulchre  of  the  Maker  of 
Kings,  it  guards  the  dust  of  the  Mother  of  Kings.  In  the 
courtyard  of  the  College  Fesch  in  the  Rue  Fesch — named  for 
the  young  uncle  who  taught  Napoleon  his  a,  b,  c  's  and  who  was 
rewarded  with  the  red  hat  of  a  cardinal — is  the  Chapel  Im- 
perial, which,  although  erected  only  in  1860,  looks  as  venerable 
as  the  ancient  mausoleum  of  the  Bourbons  at  St.  Denis.  Com- 
ing out  of  the  glare  of  the  street  into  the  dusk  of  the  chapel, 
the  visitor  sees  at  first  no  other  epitaph  than  that  of  "Mater 
Regum, "  but  drawing  nearer  the  engraved  roll  of  Letizia's 
princely  offspring  becomes  legible.  Her  silent  companions  in 
the  chapel  are  her  half  brother.  Cardinal  Fesch,  and  two 
princes  and  a  princess  among  the  lesser  known  of  the  Bona- 
partes. 

When  Letizia's  remains  were  enthroned  there,  having  first 
been  brought  from  Rome  and  placed  in  a  chapel  of  the  cathe- 
dral, the  star  of  the  Bonapartes  was  risen  again  and  was 
shining  gloriously  on  the  Second  Empire.     But  to-day  Ajaceio, 


BIKTH  AND  BIRTHPLACE  11 

alone  in  a  faithless  world,  remains  faithful  to  the  memory 
of  the  vanished  empire  and  its  dynasty. 

Some  lightning  impressionist  has  described  the  town  as  * '  the 
shade  of  Napoleon,  with  houses  built  around  it. "  It  is  a  com- 
munity of  idol  worshippers ;  it  is  all  a  big  Napoleonic  museum, 
where  every  trinket  of  the  Bonapartes  is  sacredly  cherished. 

There  is  only  one  Napoleonic  object  in  town  which  the 
Ajaccians  do  not  take  seriously.  This  is  the  group  of  statuary 
in  the  Place  du  Diamant,  at  the  edge  of  the  sea,  where  Na- 
poleon in  Roman  toggery  sits  in  bronze  on  a  horse  poised  atop 
a  block  of  granite,  with  his  four  brothers  afoot  at  the  corners. 
Even  the  idolatrous  smile  at  the  stiff  group,  which  is  derisively 
called  "the  inkstand." 

More  interesting  is  the  big,  wide  square  itself,  for  it  was  the 
playground  of  Napoleon  and  his  first  battlefield.  Whether  it 
was  all  Austerlitz  and  no  Waterloo  for  him  in  those  youthful 
engagements  we  are  left  to  wonder.  Ajaccio  then  was  a  little 
walled  town,  with  a  gate  and  bastion.  Between  the  wall  and 
the  citadel  at  the  point  of  the  peninsula  the  3500  inhabitants 
were  packed  in  eighteen  or  twenty  streets.  The  nobles  and 
merchants,  and  their  retainers,  lived  in  the  old  houses  within 
the  wall,  w^hile  the  sailors,  mechanics  and  laborers  dwelt  in  the 
hardscrabble  village  outside. 

Between  the  boys  of  those  two  communities  there  was  a  ven- 
detta bequeathed  from  generation  to  generation  of  boyhood, 
and  Napoleon  first  got  into  action  as  the  champion  of  his  side 
in  this  inherited  quarrel,  marshalling  his  troops,  armed  with 
sticks  and  stones,  to  drive  the  invaders  out  of  the  town  gate 
and  to  meet  hostile  reinforcements  under  the  wall.  The  boy 
sprang  from  a  fighting  race  and  was  bred  to  war  in  an  age  of 
strife.  His  earliest  lesson  in  history  was  of  the  Forty  Years' 
War,  which  ended  at  his  birth.  "I  was  born,"  he  once  said, 
"when  my  native  land  died."  As  the  stirring  story  of  the 
long  and  unequal  struggle  of  his  people  dawned  upon  his 
understanding,  he  adopted  Paoli  as  his  model  and  his  little 
breast  was  filled  with  patriotic  zeal. 

Friends  of  the  family,  seeing  him  eating  soldiers'  bread  in 


12  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  streets,  were  shocked  by  his  presenting  a  spectacle  so  un- 
becoming his  parentage  and  reported  it  to  his  mother,  who 
found  it  was  a  habit  of  the  boy  to  swap  his  home-made  bread 
for  the  coarser  kind  issued  to  the  garrison.  "I  am  a  soldier," 
he  insisted,  * '  and  I  intend  to  eat  what  the  soldiers  eat. ' ' 


CHAPTER  II 

SCHOOLDAYS  IN  FRANCE 

1778-1785     AGE  9-16 

A  FORLORN,  sallow-faced  boy,  not  yet  ten  years  old  and 
small  for  his  age,  alien-looking  and  speaking  broken 
French,  climbed  down  from  a  two  wheeled  cart  and 
followed  a  priest  through  the  gate  of  the  school  kept  by  the 
Minim  friars  at  Brienne  le  Chateau  in  France  one  day  in  ]\Iay 
in  the  year  1779.  There  he  was  registered  as  Napoleone  de 
Buonaparte,  although  he  called  himself  after  his  native  Cor- 
sican  fashion,  Nabulione  Buonaparte — ' '  Nah-bool-ee-ony  Bona- 
party." 

Among  the  few  more  than  100  pupils  in  the  school,  all  of 
noble  birth,  there  were  sixty  poor  boys  of  the  nobility  who  were 
educated  on  the  bounty  of  the  King,  now  Louis  XVI.  Thanks 
to  the  efforts  of  Napoleon's  father  as  a  seeker  of  government 
favours  and  his  mother's  hospitality  to  the  French  conqueror  of 
Corsica,  he  was  admitted  to  this  group.  Carlo  Bonaparte  had 
submitted  proof  of  eleven  generations  of  noble  Bonapartes  be- 
hind his  son  and  filed  a  "certificate  of  indigence,"  in  which 
four  Corsicans  declared  that  he  was  too  poor  to  educate  Na- 
poleon in  accordance  with  his  birth. 

Carlo's  memorandum  when  he  went  home,  after  placing 
Napoleon  in  school,  was  characteristic:  .  .  .  '*I  started  for 
the  court  of  France,  deputy  noble  of  the  estates  of  Corsica, 
taking  with  me  100  louis,  I  received  while  in  Paris  4000 
francs  in  gratifications  from  the  King,  and  1000  ecus  in  fees ; 
and  I  returned  without  a  sou."  He  had,  however,  brought 
back  from  Paris  twelve  beautiful  suits  of  silk  and  velvet  for 
himself. 

As  fast  as  the  younger  children  grew  up  they  were  regularly 

13 


14  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

and  promptly  transferred  by  Carlo  to  the  care  and  keep  of  a 
generous  government,  while  he  himself  was  on  the  payroll  as 
assessor  of  the  royal  court  of  justice  in  Ajaccio  and  drew  his 
emoluments  as  the  deputy  of  the  Corsican  nobility  in  Paris. 

A  lawyer  by  profession,  he  seems  to  have  had  hardly  any 
other  client  than  himself.  While  a  talented  man  and  industri- 
ous enough,  he  laboured  hard  and  constantly  all  his  days  to 
support  himself  and  family  by  some  more  respectable  means 
than  earning  his  living. 

With  his  father  away  much  of  the  time  and  his  mother 
ignorant  of  books,  Napoleon  received  no  education  at  home. 
From  his  uncle,  Joseph  Fesch,  he  learned  the  alphabet  and  he 
was  taught  the  catechism  by  his  great-uncle,  Luciano  Bona- 
parte, the  archdeacon.  At  six  he  was  sent  to  a  girls'  school 
to  receive  lessons  from  nuns  and  next  he  passed  to  a  brothers ' 
school,  Abbe  Recco's,  where  he  gave  the  first  sign  of  his  apti- 
tude for  mathematics. 

The  boy  was  only  nine  when  he  bade  good-bye  to  his  home 
to  enter  upon  a  six  years'  school  course  among  strangers  in 
a  strange  laud,  never  again  to  know  throughout  the  tender 
years  of  youth  the  loving  care  of  a  mother  or  the  affections 
and  comforts  of  a  family  circle.  Sailing  away  from  Ajaccio 
on  a  winter's  day,  with  his  father  and  Joseph  and  his  uncle 
Fesch,  he  first  set  foot  on  the  soil  of  France  at  Marseilles. 

For  three  months  he  stayed  with  Joseph  at  Autun,  in  order 
that  he  might  be  instructed  a  little  in  the  French  language,  as 
he  still  spoke  only  the  Italian  dialect  of  Corsica.  When  the 
time  came  for  him  to  leave  for  Brienne  the  elder  brother  wept 
loudly  at  the  parting,  but  only  one  tear  escaped  Napoleon's 
self-repression,  and  that  evidence  of  weakness  was  quickly 
brushed  away.  Joseph  might  cry ;  he  was  going  to  be  a  priest, 
but  a  soldier  must  have  a  stout  heart. 

The  boy  would  need  at  Brienne  all  the  stoicism  in  his  nature. 
The  discipline  there  was  prescribed  by  the  war  department  as 
suited  to  the  breeding  of  soldiers.  In  some  respects  it  would 
have  been  equally  suitable  for  a  prison  and  it  would  be  looked 
upon  to-day  as  a  cruelly  severe  regime  to  impose  upon  a  boy 
as  young  as  Napoleon. 


SCHOOLDAYS  IN  FRANCE  15 

He  wore  a  blue  uniform  with  red  facings  and  white  metal 
buttons  on  his  coat,  and  he  had  to  do  his  own  mending.  His 
hair  was  cut  short  until  he  had  reached  the  age  of  twelve, 
after  which  he  was  privileged  to  sport  a  pigtail,  but  it  must 
not  be  powdered  except  on  Sundays  and  saints'  days.  He 
slept  by  himself  in  a  six-foot  cell,  but  ate  with  the  other  boys 
in  the  mess  hall  and  knelt  with  them  in  the  chapel  at  morning 
mass  and  evening  prayer. 

He  had  no  vacations  nor  hardly  an  opportunity  to  see  the  in- 
side of  a  home.  He  saw  his  mother  only  once,  when,  yearning 
to  look  upon  her  boys,  she  persuaded  herself  to  leave  her  family 
cares  and  join  her  husband  on  a  journey  to  France,  where  she 
was  shocked  to  find  Napoleon  so  thin  and  worn. 

The  little  Corsican  had  found  himself  a  mark  for  the  boys 
of  Autun  at  the  outset  of  his  life  in  France  and  never  was 
permitted  to  forget  that  he  was  an  alien.  He  was  greeted 
with  the  same  mischievous  hostility  in  Brienne  and  had  to 
contend  with  bitter  disadvantages. 

His  appearance  and  his  foreign  accent  moved  his  young 
comrades  to  laughter.  His  Corsican  nobility  was  not  taken 
any  more  seriously  by  these  children  of  the  old  nobles  of 
France  than  if  he  claimed  descent  from  some  tribal  chief 
among  the  American  Indians.  Corsica  to  their  understanding 
was  a  savage  country  and  they  knew  of  it  only  as  a  scene  of 
rebellions  and  vendettas,  regarding  it  perhaps  as  our  world 
to-day  regards  Albania  in  the  scale  of  civilisation. 

The  paying  pupils  made  him  feel  his  poverty.  With  the 
thoughtless  and  unsparing  cruelty  of  boyhood,  they  chose  the 
friendless,  unsocial  stranger  as  a  target  for  all  manner  of 
taunts  which  drove  the  moody  boy  in  upon  his  moods  and 
sometimes  threw  him  into  fits  of  ungovernable  rage.  For  a 
time  he  led  a  gloomy,  solitary  existence  on  the  prairie  of 
northeastern  France,  far  from  his  kindred  and  in  what  seemed 
to  him  by  comparison  with  his  sunny  island  a  bleak  and  wintry 
land. 

He  did  not  get  along  much  better  with  the  friars  than  with 
the  boys  when  he  first  went  to  Brienne.  He  was  not  unruly, 
but  his  air  of  sullen  defiance  and  his  aloofness  troubled  the 


16  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

priests.  Wliile  corporal  punishment  had  been  forbidden  by 
the  government,  he  seems  to  have  received  at  least  one  flog- 
ging. Again,  for  some  infraction  of  a  rule,  he  was  ordered  to 
do  penance  before  all  the  boys  by  eating  a  meal  on  his  knees 
at  the  door  of  the  refectory.  He  protested  vehemently  that 
his  mother  had  told  him  to  kneel  only  to  God,  and  that  he 
would  kneel  to  no  man.  His  indignation  finally  running  into 
a  wild  tantrum  he  had  to  be  carried  off  to  bed. 

Plainly  the  King  of  France  was  nurturing  a  very  rebellious 
subject.  One  of  the  friars  reminded  him  of  the  debt  of  grati- 
tude he  owed  the  King,  but  the  boy  was  steadily  forming  the 
purpose  to  employ  the  education  the  nation  was  giving  him  as 
a  means  of  promoting  the  liberty  of  Corsica  rather  than  the 
glory  of  France.  ' '  I  will  do  these  French  all  the  mischief  I 
can, ' '  he  muttered,  according  to  the  report  of  one  of  his  class- 
mates. A  priest  reproving  him  at  confession  for  his  denuncia- 
tion of  France,  he  ran  out  of  the  confessional,  shouting:  "I 
do  not  come  to  this  place  to  talk  about  Corsica,  and  a  priest  has 
no  mission  to  lecture  me  on  that  subject." 

Probably  with  the  idea  of  bringing  him  into  line,  the  friars 
gave  him  a  post  of  honour  in  the  corps,  but  the  boys  court- 
martialed  him  as  "unworthy  of  our  esteem  since  he  disdains 
our  affections."  His  independence,  however,  was  piquing 
them  at  last,  and  this,  with  his  uncomplaining  acceptance 
of  their  verdict,  served  to  bring  him  more  into  their  favour. 
At  any  rate,  he  found  himself  after  a  while  on  better  terms 
with  his  surroundings,  and  with  one  of  the  boys,  Louise 
Antoine  Fauvelet  de  Bourrienne,  he  formed  a  close  friend- 
ship. 

In  Napoleon's  last  winter  at  Brienne,  there  was  a  heavy 
snow,  which  brought  him  an  opportunity,  the  only  recorded 
one,  to  be  a  leader  among  his  school  fellows.  The  snow  was 
so  deep  in  the  big  courtyard  that  the  boys  were  snowbound. 
Napoleon  proposed  that  they  get  shovels,  build  snow  forts,  and 
dividing  up,  engage  in  sieges  and  attacks.  "I,"  said  the 
strategist,  "I  will  direct  the  movements."  The  boys  took  hold 
with  enthusiasm,  the  forts  were  erected  and  were  furiously 
stormed  until  the  contending  forces  had  delved  so  deep  that 


Statuk   of    Napoleon,   the   vSchoolboy,    and   the   Gate   ok   His    Old 
School  at  Briexne  le  Chateau 


SCHOOLDAYS  IN  FRANCE  17 

gravel  was  mixed  with  the  snowballs  and  the  casualties  grew 
serious. 

The  school  as  a  school  seems  to  have  been  rather  poor.  It 
failed  utterly  to  discover  Napoleon,  and  there  is  no  record 
that  this  world-beater  won  a  single  prize  at  Brienne.  He  re- 
ceived dancing  lessons,  but  did  not  learn  to  dance.  He  took 
German,  but  seems  not  to  have  remembered  any  of  it  in  man- 
hood. He  read  Latin  authors  with  a  real  hunger  for  knowl- 
edge, but  never  got  beyond  the  fourth  class  in  his  Latin  studies. 
He  received  writing  lessons,  but  his  penmanship  is  perhaps 
the  worst  in  history. 

The  library  was  his  favourite  haunt.  In  the  recreation 
periods  he  was  more  likely  to  be  there  with  a  volume  of  Plu- 
tarch in  his  hand  than  on  the  playground.  He  had  found  for 
himself  the  combination  of  the  lock  on  the  storehouse  of  knowl- 
edge— a  desire  to  read  books,  the  habit  of  reading  them  and  a 
capacity  to  understand  them. 

He  had  been  at  Brienne  more  than  five  years  and  was  a  few 
months  past  his  fifteenth  birthday  when  he  was  promoted  to 
the  Ecole  Militaire  at  Paris.  Probably  the  only  person  in 
town  who  marked  his  departure,  the  only  soul  who  cared 
whether  he  stayed  or  went  was  Bourrienne,  who  rode  with  his 
friend  as  far  as  the  stage  line  for  Paris. 

The  charmingly  simple  village  of  Brienne  to  which  Napoleon 
came  again  after  twenty  years  and  still  again  after  ten  more, 
lies  in  the  bosom  of  France  some  one  hundred  and  twenty-five 
miles  to  the  east  of  Paris  and  near  Troyes,  the  ancient  capital 
of  Champagne.  It  is  to-day  only  a  dot  on  a  gentle  rolling, 
well  wooded  plain,  where  the  red  roofs  that  shelter  its  1800 
inhabitants  cluster  about  two  cross  roads. 

Those  are  really  the  only  streets,  with  a  few  little  lanes 
straying  off  from  them  into  the  pretty  country-side,  while 
crowning,  dominating  all  is  the  chateau.  This  is  not,  how- 
ever, one  of  the  old  French  chateaux ;  it  was  new  when  Na- 
poleon went  there  to  school,  but  on  its  hill  the  counts  of 
Brienne  have  had  their  seat  for  900  years.  At  the  cross- 
roads in  the  centre  and  almost  in  the  shadow  of  the  great  man- 
sion of  the  count,  is  this  street  sign : 


18  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 


BRIENNE  LE  CHATEAU. 


Beneath  the  newer  lettering  is  barely  discernible  an  older 
sign: 


BRIENNE  LE  NAPOLEON. 


The  fickleness  of  fame !  Brienne  had  been  proud  one  day 
to  link  her  name  with  that  of  the  little  Corsican  she  once 
despised,  after  which  there  came  another  day  when  she  painted 
out  his  name  as  if  it  never  had  been.  But  there  it  still  is, 
shining  through  the  unavailing  effort  to  eclipse  it. 

Beyond  a  block  of  idle  village  shops  on  the  other  main  street 
is  the  sightly  Hotel  de  Ville.  There  stands  in  bronze  the 
immortal  schoolboy  of  Brienne,  with  golden  eagles  and  a 
crown  at  his  feet,  but  yet  only  a  long-haired,  lean  and  hungry 
boy.  Behind  the  statue  is  the  door  of  the  Hotel  de  Ville  and 
over  it  in  marble  the  head  of  Napoleon  the  man,  with  fame 
and  victory  crowning  him. 

A  little  farther  on  in  this  street  rises  an  old  wall  and  here 
behind  this  wall  stood  the  school  of  the  Minim  friars,  the  first 
perch  of  the  eagle  in  his  flight  from  the  mother  nest  at  Ajac- 
cio.  The  school  is  no  more;  it  was  closed  by  the  Revolu- 
tion in  1793,  when  there  was  no  longer  a  king  of  France  to 
pay  for  the  education  of  the  sons  of  poor  noblemen  and  when 
noblemen  and  friars  alike  were  banished  from  the  coun- 
try. 

The  one  sur^^vor,  the  one  spared  monument  of  the  school, 
is  the  convent  in  which  the  friars  lived.  It  still  stands  under 
the  shade  of  a  noble  tree  and  there  the  soldiers  of  the  Republic, 
a  little  garrison  of  sixty  men,  have  their  barracks,  its  name 
printed  on  the  gable  end  of  the  old  convent,  "Caserne  Bona- 
parte, 1896." 

The  memory  of  the  boy  who  went  to  school  there  is  more 
graphically  preserved  by  a  weatherstained  marble  statue  of 


SCHOOLDAYS  IN  FRANCE  19 

him  above  the  gate,  with  the  inscription,  "Napoleon  1779- 
1784."  The  statue  stands  on  an  arch  beneath  which  the  sol- 
diers come  and  go  on  their  dull  routine,  and  on  which  is  in- 
scribed "Ancienne  Ecole  Militaire,  1776-1793,"  while  one 
of  the  stone  gate  posts  bears  the  roll  of  the  more  famous 
schoolboys  of  Brienne:  Bonaparte,  Bourrienne,  Pichegru, 
Davout,  Nansouty,  D'Haupoul,  Gudin,  Sorbier,  Marescot, 
La  Bretcheche,  Bruneteau,  Vallee. 

Back  at  the  crossroads  stands  the  old  church,  bare  and  still 
within,  where  the  family  of  the  count  worship  on  red  cush- 
ioned pews  in  a  special  reservation.  On  a  level  with  its  belfry 
where  now  hang  three  bells — not,  however,  the  ones  which 
long  resounded  in  the  ear  of  Napoleon — sits  the  chateau  which 
once  no  doubt  seemed  to  frown  down  upon  the  little  Corsican, 
but  where  the  Beauffremonts,  proud  of  their  long  descent,  were 
made  prouder  still  when  they  welcomed  him  back  to  Brienne 
in  1805,  for  then  he  wore  the  crown  of  France  and  was  pausing 
there  in  his  imperial  progress  to  his  second  coronation  at 
Milan. 

He  came  back  to  Brienne  once  more  in  1814,  and  there 
again  he  led  the  French  in  battle — but  this  time  not  with 
snowballs.  He  was  fighting  now  to  save  his  two  crowns,  and 
like  a  wounded  eagle  fluttering  to  its  nest,  he  ran  into  the  vil- 
lage with  all  Europe  in  pursuit  of  him.  He  found  no  wel- 
come at  the  chateau,  for  Blucher  held  it,  but  he  took  it  by 
storm  and  slept  once  more  in  the  castle  whose  showroom  to 
this  day  is  the  ' '  chambre  a  coucher  de  Napoleon, ' '  with  every- 
thing in  it  carefully  kept,  just  as  he  left  it  January  31,  1814. 

It  was  as  a  fifteen-year-old  schoolboy  from  the  village  of 
Brienne,  following  at  the  heels  of  a  Minim  friar,  that  Na- 
poleon, in  the  month  of  October,  1784,  made  his  first  entry 
into  the  capital  of  France  where  he  was  delivered  to  the 
authorities  of  the  Ecole  Militaire.  The  old  building,  which 
is  still  standing  and  belongs  to  the  army,  is  not  far  from  the 
Eiffel  Tower — and  the  Hotel  des  Invalides. 

There  Napoleon  was  entered  as  a  gentleman  cadet  and 
there  he  was  confronted  with  a  still  prouder  aristocracy,  for 
the  first  families  did  not  send  their  sons  to  Brienne. 


20  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  French  military  training  as  a  whole  was  now  the  envy 
of  other  nations  and  attracted  many  foreign  pupils.  While 
Napoleon  was  at  the  Paris  Ecole,  there  was  in  another  French 
school  at  Anglers  an  Irish  boy,  Arthur  Wellesley  by  name, 
but  better  known  to  history  as  the  Duke  of  Wellington. 

In  the  first  months  of  Napoleon's  stay  at  the  Ecole  his 
father  was  in  France  once  more,  but  this  time  for  his  health. 
He  came  to  see  a  Paris  physician  regarding  a  severe  stomach 
trouble  which  had  been  afflicting  him  for  some  time  and  it 
was  found  that  he  had  cancer.  Leaving  Paris,  he  was  at 
Montpellier,  in  southern  France,  when  his  disease  overcame 
him,  and  there  he  died,  in  the  thirty-ninth  year  of  his  life. 

Carlo's  days,  though  few,  were  yet  crowned  with  a  success 
which  he  coveted  above  any  gains  for  himself ;  an  opportunity 
for  his  children  to  take  the  position  in  the  world  to  which  he 
thought  their  birth  entitled  them. 

Like  most  men  of  great  force,  Napoleon  was  the  son  of  a 
weak  father  and  a  strong  mother.  Yet  there  was  something 
truly  Napoleonic  in  Carlo  Bonaparte's  bold  assurance  and 
restless  ambition,  and  this  may  have  been  his  legacy  to  Na- 
poleon. As  a  whole  his  character  was  a  vain  and  futile  one, 
but  his  very  weakness  fitted  him  to  play  a  certain  useful  part 
in  the  drama  of  his  son's  life. 

At  the  Ecole,  Napoleon  had  a  roommate,  Des  Mazis,  who 
became  his  bosom  friend  and  his  only  real  friend  in  all  Paris. 
There,  too,  he  made  an  enemy  who  was  destined  to  cross  his 
path  in  after  years.  This  was  a  boy  named  Phelippeaux. 
Picot  de  Peccadeuc  sat  between  the  two  boys  for  a  time,  but 
when  his  shins  were  black  and  blue  from  their  wild  kicks  at 
each  other  he  asked  to  be  moved  from  the  firing  line. 

The  most  important  thing  that  happened  to  Napoleon  while 
at  the  Ecole  was  a  new  course  of  reading  he  took  up  soon 
after  entering  the  place.  Paris  was  then  sitting  on  the  vol- 
cano of  the  Revolution,  and  the  boy's  mind  passed  under  the 
influence  of  the  revolutionary  philosophy  which  was  swaying 
the  thought  of  the  capital. 

In  the  ten  months  that  he  was  at  the  Ecole  he  won 
no  special  marks.     He  never  was  an  officer  of  the  corps  or 


SCHOOLDAYS  IN  FRANCE  21 

head  of  the  mess.  He  got  along  well  with  his  teachers  and 
some  of  them  he  never  ceased  to  remember  with  gratitude. 
In  after  years  there  were  those  who  boasted  that  they  had 
recognised  his  genius,  but  poor  Baur,  the  German  teacher, 
never  could  live  down  a  remark  he  made  one  day  in  Septem- 
ber, 1785. 

"Where  is  M.  de  Bonaparte?"  he  asked,  as  he  looked  over 
the  class, 

"In  for  the  artillery  examination,"  some  one  repUed, 

' '  What !     Does  he  know  anything  ? ' ' 

"Why,  he  is  one  of  the  best  mathematicians  in  the  school." 

"Oh,  I  have  always  thought  that  only  idiots  were  fit  to 
study  mathematics." 

Napoleon  was  examined  by  LaPlace,  the  celebrated  mathe- 
matician and  astronomer.  And  among  the  fifty-six  young 
men  who  passed,  he  stood  forty -two  from  the  top ! 

His  long  and  hard  apprenticeship  in  the  trade  of  the  sword 
was  finished  at  last  and  he  was  now  at  the  threshold  of  another 
six  years'  apprenticeship,  which  held  privations  more  bitter 
still,  an  apprenticeship  in  the  great  school  of  life. 


CHAPTER  III 

BEFORE  THE  DAWN 

1785-1793     AGE  16-23 

AFTER  graduating  from  the  Ecole  Militaire,  Napoleon 
received  an  officer's  commission,  but  he  had  to  borrow 
from  his  classmate,  Des  Mazis,  the  money  to  enable 
him  to  join  his  regiment  which  was  in  garrison  at  Valence, 
400  miles  south  of  Paris. 

Valence  is  an  attractive  old  town  of  almost  30,000  popula- 
tion, close  to  the  upper  border  of  Provence,  where,  seated  well 
above  the  banks  of  the  River  Rhone,  between  Lyons  and 
Avignon,  it  looks  across  a  vine-grown  plain  to  the  Alpine 
foothills  of  Dauphiny  on  one  side  and  the  gentle  mountains  of 
Cevennes  on  the  other. 

It  is  but  a  step  from  the  new  to  old  Valence,  where  the  little 
streets  twist  and  turn  and  tumble  down  to  the  wide,  swift 
river.  In  the  centre  of  it  stands  the  cathedral,  and  nearby 
at  the  corner  of  the  winding  Grande  Rue  and  the  still  nar- 
rower Rue  Croissant  is  No.  48,  a  shockingly  modem  four- 
story  business  block  without  an  identifying  tablet  or  even 
a  street  number  on  its  front.  Yet  there  the  eaglet  perched 
for  awhile  and  gave  Valence  its  admission  ticket  to  the  pages 
of  history. 

Apparently  the  present  tenants  are  unconscious  of  the  re- 
flected glory  in  which  they  dwell,  and  it  is  difficult  to  recall 
to  their  memory  the  days  of  1785-86,  when  a  melancholy 
stripling  came  and  went  in  their  winding  lane  of  a  Grande 
Rue.  For  at  No.  48,  Mile.  Bou,  a  spinster  who  kept  house 
for  her  old  father,  lodged  Second  Lieut.  Bonaparte  at  some- 
what less  than  $2  a  month.     As  sub  or  second  lieutenant  of 

22 


BEFORE  THE  DAWN  23 

the  regiment  of  La  Frere,  his  monthly  income  was  $20,  which 
after  all  deductions,  left  him  $7  for  clothes  and  extras. 

Poverty  was  one  of  his  best  teachers  in  those  days,  when 
he  pulled  in  his  belt  at  mealtime  and  feasted  on  Rousseau, 
Voltaire  and  other  nourishers  of  his  mind.  When  he  ate  a 
real  meal,  which  generally  was  only  once  a  day,  he  walked 
along  the  Grande  Rue  into  the  Place  des  Clercs,  and  thence 
turned  into  the  little  Rue  Perollerie,  where  he  used  to  dine  at 
the  Three  Pigeons  restaurant,  with  one  eye  on  the  bill  of  fare 
and  the  other  on  the  few  cents  to  which  he  limited  his  appetite. 

He  remained  as  unattractive  in  appearance  as  he  had  been 
from  birth,  with  a  presence  almost  uncanny.  Visiting  a  Cor- 
sican  in  a  nearby  town,  the  earliest  existing  portrait  of  him 
was  drawn  by  his  young  host.  It  is  a  crude  piece  of  art,  but 
it  serves  as  evidence  of  his  uncomely  youth. 

The  only  social  life  he  could  afford  was  the  simplest,  which, 
however,  is  always  the  best.  He  brought  a  letter  from  the 
Archbishop  of  Autun,  nephew  of  his  old  benefactor,  Count 
Marbeuf,  the  French  Governor  of  Corsica,  introducing  him 
to  the  abbe  of  St.  Ruff  at  the  old  abbaye,  now  the  prefecture 
for  the  department  of  the  Drone,  down  near  the  foot  of  the 
Grande  Rue.  The  abbe  was  a  man  in  touch  with  the  prog- 
ress of  thought  and  the  Abbe  Raynal,  whom  the  boy  officer 
also  came  to  know  there,  ranked  at  the  time  among  the  fore- 
most philosophers  of  France. 

At  the  abbaye,  too,  this  youth  of  sixteen,  who  had  left  home 
at  nine  and  been  brought  up  in  a  monastery,  formed  an  ac- 
quaintance with  a  hitherto  unknown  species  of  the  human 
race,  a  girl,  ]\Ille.  Colombier,  and  the  shadow  of  this  littje 
French  lass  was  caught  for  all  time  on  the  films  in  the  mov- 
ing picture  of  Napoleon's  life.  Her  mother  invited  him  oft, 
and  while  he  said  aftenvard  that  he  was  in  love  with  mademoi- 
selle we  have  no  other  detail  of  their  brief  romance  than  that 
they  picked  and  ate  cherries  together  in  her  orchard. 

Woman's  looks  never  were  to  be  Napoleon's  books.  The 
Maison  des  Tetes  stood  opposite  Mile.  Sou's  lodging  house 
and  the  hoary  heads  sculptured  on  its  front  still  grin  and 
glower  on  the  wayfarer  by  the  Grande  Rue.     There  used  to 


24  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

be  a  bookseller  in  that  house  of  the  heads,  and  the  gaunt  shade 
of  the  second  lieutenant  haunts  the  old  place  to  this  day.  We 
may  see  him  with  covetous  eyes  still  bending  over  the  book 
stalls  and  calculating  how  many  weeks  he  must  wait  to  save 
enough  out  of  his  $7  of  spare  money  each  month  to  buy  some 
work  which  he  longed  to  carry  to  his  lonely  den  across  the 
street. 

Those  were  the  brave  and  ingenuous  days,  as  he  afterwards 
confessed,  when  he  would  have  died  to  uphold  the  social  doc- 
trines of  Jean  Jacques  Kousseau  and  when  he  read  Goethe's 
"Werther"  five  times,  while  he  lived  these  mournful  lines  in 
''Wilhelm  Meister:" 

Who  never  ate  his  bread  in  sorrow. 
Who  never  spent  the  darksome  hours 
Weeping  and  watching  for  the  morrow — 
He  knows  ye  not,  ye  gloomy  Powers. 

In  his  first  spring  time  at  Valence,  while  the  cherries  were 
red  on  Mme.  Colombier's  trees,  Napoleon,  already  gloomy  and 
peculiar,  but  yet  far  from  grand,  sat  down  in  his  bare  room 
at  No.  48  and  thus  poured  forth  upon  the  pages  of  his  diary 
the  bitterness  of  his  soul: 

Always  alone  when  in  the  midst  of  men,  I  return  to  my  room  to 
dream  by  myself  and  to  give  myself  up  to  the  full  tide  of  my  melan- 
choly. What,  forsooth,  am  I  here  for  in  this  world?  Since  death 
must  come  to  me,  why  would  it  not  be  as  well  to  kill  myself?  .  .  . 
Since  I  begin  life  in  suffering  misfortune,  and  nothing  gives  me 
pleasure,  why  should  I  endure  these  days  when  nothing  with  which 
I  am  concerned  prospers"? 

Nevertheless  he  did  not  jump  into  the  Rhone.  On  the  con- 
trary, he  went  on  reading,  reading,  writing,  writing,  study- 
ing, studying,  tracing  out  the  institutions  of  all  ages  and  lands 
and  training  his  mind  for  the  hidden  future.  If  he  had  read 
his  destiny  in  the  book  of  fate  he  could  not  have  chosen  a 
better  mental  preparation  for  it. 

When  he  had  been  with  his  regiment  less  than  a  year,  he 
received  a  leave  of  absence  and  went  home  taking  two  trunks, 


BEFORE  THE  DAWN  25 

but  the  larger  one  was  filled  with  books.  After  having  been 
away  nearly  eight  years,  he  came  back  a  Corsican  of  the  Corsi- 
cans,  but  to  find  the  fortunes  of  his  family  at  low  ebb,  his 
mother  without  a  servant  and  much  of  the  time  her  own  laun- 
dress and  seamstress. 

He  did  not  rejoin  his  regiment  until  he  had  been  absent 
from  it  more  than  twenty  months.  It  was  now  at  Auxonne, 
much  farther  north  and  between  Dijon  and  the  Swiss  frontier, 
where  again  his  one  diversion  from  the  irksome  regimental 
routine  and  his  galling  poverty  was  afforded  by  his  unfailing 
friends,  his  books  and  his  pen. 

"Heaven  knows  what  privations!"  he  exclaimed  when,  in 
after  life,  he  looked  back  on  those  days  at  Auxonne.  "Do 
you  know  how  I  managed  it?  It  was  by  never  setting  foot 
inside  a  cafe  or  appearing  in  the  social  world.  It  was  by 
eating  dry  bread.  ...  I  lived  like  a  bear.  .  .  .  AVhen  by  dint 
of  abstinence  I  amassed  the  sum  of  twelve  livres,  I  turned  my 
steps  with  the  joy  of  a  child  toward  the  shop  of  a  bookseller." 

The  less  he  had  and  the  less  he  ate,  the  more  he  read  and 
wrote,  the  harder  he  worked.  Going  to  bed  at  ten,  he  was 
up  by  four  and  at  his  littered  table.  The  half-fed  genius  was 
in  a  frenzy  of  literary  composition,  turning  off  nearly  thirty 
papers  on  as  many  different  subjects,  only  to  be  rebuffed  by 
the  publishers  of  three  cities.  He  wrote  historical  and  philo- 
sophical essays,  novels  and  plays,  but  none  ever  achieved  the 
triumph  of  the  types. 

Then  the  Bastille  fell.  The  great  Revolution  was  on  and, 
spreading  like  a  prairie  fire,  it  was  at  Auxonne  in  five  days, 
where  it  took  the  form  of  a  riot.  The  stirring  events  aroused 
Napoleon  from  his  literary  dreams.  He  must  have  a  part  in 
the  new  era  of  action.  But  not  in  Auxonne,  nor  in  Paris,  nor 
anywhere  in  France.  No,  he  must  hasten  to  the  one  object  of 
his  thoughts,  Corsica. 

Turning  his  back  upon  France  in  the  midst  of  her  history- 
making  and  going  to  Ajaccio,  it  might  almost  be  said  that  he 
carried  the  Revolution  with  him.  He  restlessly  promoted  the 
formation  of  revolutionary  clubs  and  machinery,  while  he 
stalked  the  floor  of  his  room  at  night  reading  and  declaiming 


26  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Caesar's  Commentaries  and  other  narratives  of  heroic  action. 

He  returned  to  his  regiment  at  Auxonne,  after  an  absence 
of  a  year  and  three  quarters.  If  he  had  found  it  hard  to  live 
on  $20  a  month  when  alone,  he  must  now  endure  greater  hard- 
ships, for  he  had  brought  his  twelve-year-old  broth-^r  Louis 
with  him.  He  hoped  to  get  the  boy  into  a  military  school, 
but  while  waiting  to  have  the  government  take  him  off  his 
hands  he  must  be  his  teacher. 

The  desertion  of  aristocratic  officers  from  the  army  thrust 
upon  Napoleon  a  promotion  to  a  first  lieutenancy  and  he  re- 
ceived orders  to  return  to  Valence,  where  he  went  back  to  his 
old  lodgings  at  Mile.  Bou's  and  became  the  secretary  of  a 
revolutionary  club.  This  was  the  period  of  Louis  XVI 's  at- 
tempted flight  and  arrest.  The  tide  was  moving  with  increas- 
ing swiftness — but  Napoleon  once  more  returned  to  Corsica 
to  seek  martial  glory  with  the  new  island  militia  which  was 
organising  as  a  part  of  the  national  guard.  "The  post  of 
honour  of  a  good  Corsican,"  said  this  lieutenant  in  the  army 
of  France,  "is  in  his  own  country. ' ' 

After  a  long  and  exciting  struggle  he  won  the  election  to 
the  lieutenant  colonelcy  in  the  Corsican  national  guard.  At 
the  same  time,  he  raised  up  a  life-long  enemy  in  the  person  of 
Carlo  Andrea  Pozzo  di  Borgo,  whose  family  homestead  stands 
to  this  day  on  the  Rue  Napoleon,  near  the  Bonaparte  house. 
All  Europe  became  the  theatre  of  the  vendetta  between  those 
two  young  Corsicans,  Pozzo  proving  to  be  Napoleon's  most 
relentless  nemesis.  Echoes  of  their  feud  still  are  heard  in 
Ajaccio,  whither  descendants  of  Pozzo  have  brought  stones 
from  the  demolished  palace  of  the  Napoleons,  the  Tuileries  at 
Paris,  and  with  them  have  erected  a  country  house,  the  most 
conspicuous  structure  on  the  mountain  side  above  the  Bay  of 
Ajaccio. 

In  his  absorbing  ambition  to  lead  the  Corsican  national 
guard  Napoleon  had  ignored  the  peremptory  order  for  all 
array  officers  to  return  to  their  posts,  and  ignored  as  well  the 
peril  of  the  nation  exposed  to  foreign  invasion.  ' '  Bonaparte, 
first  lieutenant,  .  .  .  has  given  up  his  profession  and  been 
replaced  on  Feb.  6,  1792,"  so  ran  the  records  of  his  regiment. 


BEFORE  THE  DAWN  2 

Going  to  Paris  to  recover  his  abandoned  place  in  the  army, 
he  entered  the  capital,  out  of  a  job  and  a  man  without  a  coun- 
try. His  coming  was  well  timed  for  his  further  education. 
For  he  saw  Paris  in  the  midst  of  the  painful  travail  that  at- 
tended the  birth  of  the  first  Republic. 

Falling  in  with  Bourrienne,  his  old  chum  at  Brienne,  they 
shared  their  poverty,  but  Bourrienne  has  insisted  that  Na- 
poleon was  the  poorer  and  had  to  pawn  his  watch.  With  the 
rising  tide  of  the  Revolution  already  up  to  their  ankles,  this 
well  met  pair  were  so  little  stirred  that  they  could  coolly  dis- 
cuss over  their  six-cent  dinners,  which  Bourrienne  says  he 
generally  paid  for,  the  opening  of  a  real  estate  agency  and  a 
prosaic  business  partnership. 

One  day  in  the  Rue  des  Petit  Champs,  Napoleon  met  "a 
crowd  of  hideous  men,"  according  to  his  description,  bearing 
aloft  a  human  head  on  a  pike.  They  demanded  that  he  cry 
"Vive  la  Nation,"  and  he  has  assured  us,  "I  did  it  without 
difficulty,  as  you  may  believe."  The  young  disciple  of  Rous- 
seau was  being  introduced  at  close  range  to  the  terrible  reali- 
ties of  the  Revolution  which  to  him  had  been  only  an  ab- 
straction. 

He  and  Bourrienne  followed  the  mob  in  its  first  attack  on 
the  Tuileries  in  June,  1792,  and,  from  the  terraced  bank  of 
the  Seine,  viewed  a  riotous  assemblage  swarming  in  the  palace, 
chopping  its  way  through  the  doors  with  hatchets  and  com- 
pelling the  King  to  put  on  the  red  cap  of  liberty.  Bourrienne 
reports  his  companion  indignantly  shouting,  "Why  have  they 
let  in  all  that  rabble?  They  should  sweep  off  40b  or  500  of 
them  with  the  cannon ;  the  rest  of  them  would  then  set  off  fast 
enough."  In  a  letter  to  a  brother,  Napoleon  solemnly  com- 
mented on  the  occurrence,  "All  this  is  unconstitutional  and 
sets  a  very  dangerous  example;  it  is  difficult  to  see  what  will 
become  of  the  Empire  under  these  stormy  circumstances." 

When  the  palace  was  sacked  in  August,  Bourrienne  was 
gone  from  Paris,  but  his  friend  was  loitering  in  the  streets  as 
usual  and  was  caught  up  in  the  swirling  tumult.  There  were 
shops  in  those  days  between  the  Louvre  and  the  Tuileries, 
where  Napoleon's  Arch  of  the   Carrousel  now  stands,  and 


28  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Bourrienne's  uncle  kept  one  of  them.  Thither  Napoleon  has- 
tened to  watch  the  storming  of  the  palace,  the  deadly  battle 
between  the  people  and  the  Swiss  Guard,  and  the  flight  of  the 
royal  family  to  the  national  assembly  in  the  tennis  court, 
whose  site  is  now  occupied  by  the  Hotel  Continental. 

While  in  Paris  Napoleon  not  only  succeeded  in  having  his 
name  restored  to  the  army  lists,  but  also  received  promotion  to 
a  captaincy.  Yet,  with  the  Germans  on  French  soil  and  Paris 
passing  into  the  dark  shadows  of  the  Reign  of  Terror,  he 
begged  another  leave  and  returned  once  more  to  the  little 
island  out  of  the  world.  He  had  now  been  in  the  army  seven 
years,  and  absent  from  duty  more  than  half  the  time! 

In  the  course  of  the  following  winter  in  Corsica,  he  took 
part  for  the  first  time  in  a  military  campaign  as  commander 
of  the  artillery  in  an  expedition  designed  to  carry  the  Revo- 
lution into  the  neighbouring  island  of  Sardinia.  In  the  long 
period  of  preparation  he  was  at  Bonifacio,  a  weirdly  pic- 
turesque Corsican  port,  where  he  lodged  opposite  the  old  house 
in  which  Charles  V  stayed  more  than  two  centuries  before. 
The  expedition  resulted  in  a  fiasco,  and  the  Bonapartists,  ac- 
cusing Paoli  of  desiring  the  failure  of  the  campaign,  the  breach 
between  the  young  Corsican  and  the  old  grew  wider  still. 

While  both  were  fervent  Corsicans,  one  had  received  his 
political  training  in  England  and  the  other  in  Prance.  As 
the  Revolution  developed,  Paoli  was  steadily  driven  back  upon 
the  English  moderation  which  he  had  acquired  in  his  exile 
among  a  people  who  always  believe  in  going  ahead  slowly. 
In  the  veins  of  the  younger  man  the  warm  blood  of  Italy 
coursed  untamed.  He  was  still  Italian  and  something  more 
intense  than  that,  a  Corsican,  and  not  yet  the  calculating  man 
of  the  great  world. 

When  early  in  1793  war  was  declared  between  France  and 
England,  Corsicans  had  to  choose  between  the  French  who 
held  the  forts  of  the  island  and  the  British  whose  warships 
lay  at  the  harbour  mouths.  Turning  with  a  shudder  from 
France  under  the  Terror,  Paoli  naturally  looked  to  his  Eng- 
lish friends  and  welcomed  an  English  protectorate.     Napoleon, 


BEFORE  THE  DAWN  29 

on  the  other  hand,  chose  a  broad  path  and  became  a  French- 
man at  last. 

After  various  adventures  he  joined  the  representatives  of 
the  French  revolutionary  government  in  the  island  and  en- 
gaged in  a  footless  expedition  organised  to  capture  Ajaccio 
from  the  Paolists.  Despairing  of  the  success  of  this  move- 
ment he  sent  a  courier  to  warn  his  mother,  "Prepare  your- 
self, ' '  he  wrote,  ' '  this  country  is  not  for  us. ' ' 

Letizia  was  lying  on  a  couch  in  the  Bonaparte  house  one 
evening  when  the  courier  and  a  band  of  faithful  followers 
burst  in  upon  her.  As  she  sprang  up  she  feared  she  was  in 
the  hands  of  the  Paolists,  but  by  the  light  of  their  pine  torches 
she  recognised  the  rough  but  friendly  mountaineers  who  had 
come  to  save  her.  "Be  quick,  Signora  Letizia!"  cried  the 
leader.  "Paoli's  people  are  hard  on  our  heels.  There  is  not 
a  moment  to  lose.     We  will  save  you  or  die  with  you ! ' ' 

With  the  Abbe  Fesch,  her  son  Louis  and  her  daughters 
Elisa  and  Pauline  she  fled  along  the  shore,  having  been  obliged 
to  leave  behind  two  of  her  children,  Caroline  and  Jerome,  who 
were  too  young  to  endure  the  hardships  of  such  a  journey. 
Before  morning  the  Paolists  had  broken  into  the  homestead 
in  the  Rue  St.  Charles  and  by  smashing  and  burning  they  laid 
waste  the  interior  of  the  house. 

Plainly  the  fortunes  of  the  Bonapartes  were  at  an  end  in 
the  island.  They  had  been  driven  from  their  home  and  de- 
nounced by  formal  resolution :  "  It  is  beneath  the  dignity  of 
the  Corsican  people  to  trouble  themselves  about  the  families 
of  Arena  and  Bonaparte;  they  abandon  them  to  their  own 
private  remorse  and  to  public  opinion,  which  has  already  con- 
demned them  to  perpetual  execration  and  infamy. ' ' 

The  proscribed  Bonapartes  gathered  under  a  friendly  roof 
at  Calvi  and  watched  for  an  opportunity  to  escape  from  their 
native  land.  As  Calvi  was  their  last  refuge  in  Corsica,  so  it 
became  the  last  refuge  of  all  who  resisted  the  transfer  of  the 
island  to  England.  Climbing  up  from  the  harbour,  cun- 
ningly hid  in  the  mountains,  to  the  old  town,  a  civic  mummy 
sealed  in  its  two  or  three  casings  of  stony  battlements,  the 


30  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

traveller  finds  Calvi's  two  proudest  boasts  inscribed  on  its 
time-scarred  and  bullet  riddled  walls.  The  first  is  engraved 
above  its  gate:  "Always  Faithful,"  and  the  second  is 
carved  on  a  heap  of  ruins  which  purports  to  have  been  the 
birthplace  of  Christopher  Columbus. 

AMiile  Calvi  has  not  established  this  latter  boast  to  the  sat- 
isfaction of  history,  it  made  good  its  other  boast  before  it  sur- 
rendered to  the  English  ships  in  1794.  For  it  held  out  until 
25,000  bullets,  6500  bombs  and  1500  shells  had  rained  upon  it, 
and  it  looks  to-day  as  if  it  had  as  many  scars  as  that  to  show 
for  the  long  siege.  Besides  Horatio  Nelson  paid  an  eye — the 
historic  eye,  which  afterward  won  the  Battle  of  Copenhagen — 
for  his  part  in  the  subjugation  of  this  stubborn  old  town. 

The  British  frigates  were  already  gathering  off  Calvi  when 
the  prow  of  a  little  boat,  with  its  cargo  of  future  sovereigns 
and  princes  cut  through  the  w^aters  on  Napoleon's  first  exile 
and  bore  him  from  the  mountainous  shore  to  his  destiny.  Cor- 
sica never  has  ceased  to  repent  her  banishment  of  him  or 
wearied  in  bringing  forth  works  meet  for  repentance.  Long 
ago  she  unanimously  ratified  his  choice  of  nationality  and  is 
to-day  as  French  as  France. 

The  Ajaccians  indeed  are  still  voting  for  Napoleon.  The 
island  as  a  whole  may  have  been  more  or  less  won  over  to  the 
Republic.  At  least  candidates  bearing  the  republican  label 
are  elected  to  sit  in  the  chamber  of  deputies  at  Paris,  although 
some  of  them  never  overcome  the  suspicion  of  the  ministry 
that  they  are  Bonapartists  in  disguise. 

Ajaccio  does  not  stoop  to  dissemble.  She  is  Bonapartist 
first,  last  and  all  the  time.  An  Ajaccian  returns  from  a  pil- 
grimage to  Prince  Victor  at  Brussels  like  a  Mahometan  from 
Mecca,  and  the  glasses  clink  at  the  Cafe  Napoleon  on  the 
Cours  Napoleon  to  the  health  and  success  of  the  pretender  to 
the  throne  of  the  Bonapartes.  Every  man  in  the  street  seems 
to  be  saying  to  the  passing  stranger:  "Behold,  I  am  of  the 
Napoleon  breed,  and  Napoleon  was  nothing  more  than  a  Corsi- 
can  who  had  a  fair  chance  in  the  world!" 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  MAN  ON  HORSEBACK 

1793-1795     AGE  23-26 

BANISHED  from  Corsica,  the  Bonapartes  landed  in 
France  in  June  of  1793,  with  hardly  more  than  the 
poor  clothes  they  wore  and  without  a  door  opening  to 
welcome  them.  Yet  even  as  they  stepped  ashore  at  Toulon, 
opportunity,  though  unseen,  waited  for  one  of  the  penniless 
refugees  across  only  a  mile  or  so  of  water  by  the  grassy  ram- 
parts of  La  Seyne. 

Had  Napoleon's  career,  however,  ended  beneath  the  waves 
of  the  Mediterranean  in  his  flight  from  Calvi  to  Toulon,  the 
Corsican  historians  could  have  dismissed  him  in  a  line  as  a 
rashly  importunate  young  man  who  died  at  four  and  twenty 
after  having  failed  in  every  undertaking  whether  with  the  pen 
or  the  sword.  A  prolific  author  without  a  publisher,  a  sol- 
dier for  nearly  eight  years  who  in  the  midst  of  great  wars 
never  had  been  in  battle,  failure  was  writ  large  on  his  gloomy 
brow  as  he  stepped  ashore  at  Toulon  and  led  his  mother  and 
brothers  and  sisters  to  official  headquarters  where  they  threw 
themselves  on  the  charity  of  the  government. 

As  refugees  from  the  enemies  of  France  the  family  received 
rude  shelter  in  a  village  on  the  side  of  Mt.  Faron,  which  rises 
back  of  Toulon.  The  gossips  of  history  say  they  slept  at  first 
on  straw  piles  and  cooked  in  a  broken  pot  the  raw  rations 
issued  to  them  by  the  commissary.  Afterward  they  were  in- 
stalled in  comparative  comfort  under  a  peasant's  roof  in  a 
village  on  the  shore. 

Robespierre  was  at  the  height  of  his  ruthless  power  that 
red  summer,  defying  the  armies  of  allied  Europe  at  the  fron- 
tiers and  beating  down  the  Girondists  in  a  civil  war  at  home. 

31 


32  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

After  Napoleon  had  drifted  about,  unattached  and  doing  odd 
jobs  for  the  army,  he  returned  to  Toulon  and  asked  his  fellow- 
Corsican,  Salicetti,  to  let  him  take  part  in  the  siege  there. 
Thus  at  the  end  of  summer,  he  was  back  at  his  starting  point, 
but  this  time  he  was  not  in  the  bread  line.  He  had  come  now 
to  inscribe  the  name  of  Toulon  first  on  the  list  of  his  victories. 

The  obscure  little  artilleryman  at  once  felt  his  superiority 
to  the  amateur  talent  engaged  in  the  siege,  and  he  quickly 
saw  that  the  rebellious  town,  floating  the  white  banner  of  the 
Bourbons,  was  enabled  to  maintain  its  resistance  to  the  Re- 
public only  by  the  assistance  of  the  warships  of  England  and 
other  nations  which  lay  in  its  two  harbours.  His  strategic 
eye  lighted  on  this  single  fact  and  ignored  all  else.  Gen- 
eral Carteaux,  the  commander,  in  hurling  his  soldiers  against 
the  forts  in  the  rear  of  the  town  had  only  been  pulling  the 
coat-tails  of  Toulon.  Napoleon,  like  a  good  anatomist,  saw 
that  the  one  and  only  thing  to  do  was  to  take  Toulon  by  its 
harbour  throat  and  choke  it  into  submission.  While  the  ships 
remained,  it  was  as  absurd  to  capture  the  place  as  it  would 
be  to  capture  a  red-hot  stove.  It  could  not  be  held ;  it  would 
have  to  be  dropped. 

When  a  council  of  war  was  held  to  listen  to  some  lengthy 
instructions  from  the  parlour  strategists  of  Paris,  telling  just 
how  Toulon  should  be  taken,  the  lean  and  sallow  captain  of 
artillery  rose  to  dissent.  Stepping  to  a  military  map,  he 
placed  his  finger  on  a  point  of  land  at  the  mouth  of  the  har- 
bour, several  miles  from  the  fortifications  of  the  town,  and 
said  in  a  truly  Napoleonic  epigram,  "Toulon  is  there!" 

Napoleon's  startling  announcement  that  Toulon  is  not  at 
Toulon  may  be  verified  to-day.  It  is  really  at  the  next  station. 
La  Seyne,  a  busy  ship-building  town  of  20,000  population, 
with  ferries  and  street  cars  running  between  it  and  the  larger 
place  across  the  harbour.  The  fierce  wind  which  tears  down 
the  valley  of  the  Ehone,  blows  through  the  town  in  a  whirling 
mistral,  past  sidewalks  littered  with  empty  cafe  tables,  past 
the  high  wall  of  a  shipyard  to  I'Eguillette.  There  a  green 
hill  rises  from  the  road ;  there  Napoleon  received  his  real  bap- 
tism of  fire  and  there  he  first  tasted  success. 


THE  MAN  ON  HORSEBACK  33 

The  British  had  also  recognised  the  vital  importance  of  this 
promontory  and  before  Napoleon  could  set  up  a  battery  they 
landed  and  strongly  fortified  the  point,  naming  their  princi- 
pal fort,  "Little  Gibraltar,"  But  they  very  kindly  left  him 
a  commanding  height  close  by  and  there  he  immediately  began 
to  erect  his  batteries. 

One  of  his  forts  was  almost  within  pistol  shot  of  "Little 
Gibraltar"  and  by  no  means  an  inviting  place.  But  its 
builder  nailed  to  it  a  sign  on  which  was  rudely  printed  in  big 
letters  this  legend : 


THE  BATTERY  OF  MEN 
WITHOUT  FEAR 


That  was  enough,  and  volunteers  swarmed  into  the  perilous 
place.  Their  commander  daily  showed  his  contempt  for  dan- 
ger. Once  while  he  was  dictating  a  report  to  a  sergeant  a 
shell  burst  on  the  earthworks  above  their  heads  and  covered 
with  dirt  the  undried  ink.  The  soldier  only  smiled  at  this 
close  call  and  coolly  said  as  he  shook  the  sheet:  "Good!  I 
shan't  need  any  sand  to  blot  this."  The  admiring  commander 
recognised  a  man  after  his  own  heart  and  in  that  luekj^  moment 
Sergeant  Junot  had  bound  himself  for  life  to  the  fortunes  of 
Napoleon. 

On  a  wild  and  stormy  night  in  December,  1793,  nearly  two 
months  after  Napoleon's  arrival  at  Toulon,  when  the  wind 
was  howling  and  blowing  the  rain  in  sheets  and  the  lightning 
cracked  and  flashed  in  the  darkness,  his  plan  of  campaign  was 
put  to  the  supreme  test.  Against  the  advice  of  the  commis- 
sioners and  notwithstanding  the  fears  of  most  of  the  officers, 
the  French  made  a  dash  at  "Little  Gibraltar."  They  were 
beaten  back  again  and  again.  But  the  fight  continued  until 
three  o'clock  in  the  morning,  when  with  his  men  behind  him, 
Captain  Muiron,  to  the  undying  admiration  of  Napoleon, 
climbed  the  slope  of  the  enemy's  fort,  rushed  through  a  breach 


34  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in  its  wall,  and  cut  down  the  English  and  Spaniards  at  their 
guns. 

"Little  Gibraltar"  lost,  the  other  shore  batteries  of  the 
British  were  useless.  Their  defenders  leaped  into  the  water 
and  swam  to  the  ships.  Just  as  Napoleon  had  predicted  weeks 
before,  the  town  of  Toulon  fell  without  receiving  a  shot.  The 
fleet  hurried  away,  the  magazines  were  blown  up  in  a  terrific 
explosion,  and  the  flames  from  the  burning  stores  lit  the  sky, 
while  the  population  of  Toulon  struggled  to  escape  by  sea 
from  Robespierre's  avenging  messengers. 

The  historic  hill  rising  from  I'Eguillette  bears  to  this  day 
the  name  of  Fort  Napoleon.  Among  its  bushes  still  may  be 
traced  the  earthworks  where  stood  the  men  of  the  ''Battery 
Without  Fear,"  while  high  above  its  grassy  summit  the  flag 
of  France  rides  the  gale. 

Down  at  the  foot  of  the  hill  is  an  old  grey  fort  which  Car- 
dinal Richelieu  constructed,  and  beyond  are  the  green  parks 
and  red  roofs  of  the  villas  of  ship  builders  and  merchants  in 
the  pretty  seaside  suburb  of  Tamaris,  in  one  of  which  ' '  George 
Sands"  wrote  her  romance  of  that  name,  while  on  the  other 
hand,  the  mountainous  side  of  Six  Fours  forms  a  background. 

Standing  on  Napoleon's  hill  it  is  plainly  to  be  seen  that 
' '  Toulon  is  here, ' '  and  that  the  French  have  not  forgotten  the 
lesson  taught  by  Napoleon,  For  to-day  the  entire  shore  is  the 
hiding  place  of  modern  batteries  for  the  protection  of  the  great 
naval  port  of  France. 

His  first  battle  brought  the  little  artilleryman  the  rank  of 
brigadier  general  and  an  assignment  to  the  Army  of  Italy, 
as  the  French  force  destined  for  an  Italian  campaign  was 
called.  As  the  youthful  brigadier  passed  along  the  lovely 
Riviera  on  his  various  missions  to  and  fro,  he  looked  up  the 
narrow  passes,  the  open  gates  in  the  great,  high  walls  of  the 
Maritime  Alps,  which,  like  huge  breakwaters,  rise  almost  sheer 
from  the  ivory  shore  of  the  Mediterranean.  It  was  while  peer- 
ing through  those  gateways  to  Italy  that  a  plan  of  campaign 
far  greater  than  that  of  Toulon  started  in  his  mind. 

Just  then  there  came  another  revolution  in  Paris.  It  was 
Robespierre's  turn  at  the  guillotine,  and  as  his  head  fell  in  the 


Ax   Early   1'oktkait  ok   Xapoluin.   r.v    IJau.i.v 


THE  MAN  ON  HORSEBACK  35 

sack,  the  new  party  in  the  government  at  once  began  to  mark 
out  for  the  same  fate  all  the  chief  associates  of  the  fallen 
Terrorist. 

Napoleon  quickly  found  himself  in  a  cell  and  under  orders 
to  report  in  Paris,  whose  other  name  was  the  guillotine  in  those 
days.  Fortunately  for  the  prisoner,  the  guillotine  was  weary 
at  last,  and  after  eight  days  in  confinement  he  was  liberated, 
but  only  to  meet  troubles  no  less  annoying. 

Ordered  to  join  the  infantry  in  the  Army  of  the  West,  he 
went  to  Paris  to  remonstrate  against  his  transfer  from  the 
artillery.  The  orders  were  not  changed,  but  he  contrived  to 
go  over  the  head  of  the  bureaucrat  who  had  assigned  him  to 
the  infantry  and  he  gained  the  attention  of  more  powerful 
men  in  the  government. 

The  dream  of  the  Orient,  which  was  long  to  haunt  him, 
came  to  him  now  and  he  induced  the  authorities  to  order  him 
to  Turkey  for  the  purpose  of  training  and  strengthening  the 
army  of  the  Sultan  as  a  possible  ally  of  France.  On  the  same 
day  that  he  obtained  this  favour  from  one  department,  his 
name  was  erased  from  the  list  of  generals  by  another  depart- 
ment because  he  had  disregarded  no  less  than  three  orders  to 
join  the  Army  of  the  West.  While  he  was  in  this  plight, 
busily  striving  to  have  his  name  restored  and  to  get  together  a 
staff  for  his  Constantinople  trip,  the  real  opportunity  of  his 
life  came  to  him  in  the  very  streets  of  Paris. 

All  American  visitors  in  the  French  capital  have  seen,  but 
probably  few  have  observed  the  battlefield  where  Napoleon 
won  a  victory  as  important  and  decisive  as  any  that  ever  fell 
to  his  sword.  For  there  he  took  Paris.  This  field  lies  in  the 
very  heart  of  the  city,  in  the  familiar  Paris  of  the  tourist, 
between  the  boulevards  and  the  river,  with  the  Tuileries  as 
the  focal  point. 

The  broad  steps  of  the  Church  of  St.  Roch  in  the  Rue  St. 
Honore  are  a  famous  landmark  on  this  battlefield.  There, 
with  his  "whiff  of  grapeshot,"  the  little  artilleryman  really 
brought  the  great  Revolution  to  an  end. 

The  people  longed  for  repose  and  a  peaceful  adjustment 
to  the  new  conditions.     But  scheming  politicians  and  plotting 


36  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Bourbons  would  not  let  the  Republic  rest  and  once  more  Paris 
was  threatened  with  an  uprising.  The  government  of  the  day 
naturally  enough  turned  to  the  friendless  young  officer  out 
of  a  job. 

The  attempted  revolution  came  one  day  in  early  October, 
in  the  year  1795.  It  was  by  no  means  a  ragged  mob  which 
moved  through  the  streets  toward  the  old  royal  riding  school 
— where  the  Hotel  Continental  now  is — on  the  13th  Vende- 
miaire,  according  to  the  republican  calendar.  This  Bourbon 
and  revolutionary  uprising  might  properly  be  called  a  broad- 
cloth mob,  but  it  really  was  not  a  mob  at  all.  It  was  an  army 
whose  main  force  consisted  of  no  less  than  30,000  or  40,000 
armed  and  drilled  troops  of  the  national  guard.  Napoleon's 
forces,  on  the  other  hand,  numbered  only  5000  or  6000  sol- 
diers, or  regulars,  as  we  would  say,  but  they  had  the  cruel 
advantage  of  artillery. 

As  the  insurrectionary  troops  from  various  directions  drew 
near  their  goal,  they  were  met  always  at  the  vital  point  by 
the  cannon  of  the  much  smaller  but  more  soldierly  forces  of 
regular  and  veteran  troops.  Everywhere  they  were  con- 
fronted by  a  plan  of  campaign  in  which  nothing  had  been 
left  to  chance.  Napoleon  had  treated  the  square  mile  of  city 
streets  surrounding  the  Tuileries  like  a  chess  board,  and  the 
defensive  forces  had  been  posted  at  all  the  vantage  points  by 
a  master  of  strategy. 

For  hours  the  two  forces  had  stood  stock  still,  facing  each 
other,  in  the  Eue  St.  Honore,  when  late  in  the  afternoon 
some  one  fired  a  wild  shot  from  an  upper  window  of  a  house 
close  by  the  Church  of  St.  Roch.  That  shot  was  the  lighted 
match  in  the  powder  and  a  fusillade  instantly  followed,  the 
echo  of  which,  floating  through  the  streets,  was  the  signal  for 
an  outbreak  at  other  points. 

Soon  the  crackling  reverberations  of  the  muskets  were  lost 
in  the  awful  boom  of  the  cannon,  which  shook  the  windows 
of  Paris.  The  musketry  wavered,  rallied  for  a  moment  and 
then  fled  in  a  wild  rout.  In  an  hour  it  was  all  ended,  with 
200  dead  lying  in  the  streets.  When  the  bells  in  the  towers 
of  the  great  capital  struck  twelve  at  midnight  their  peals  rang 


THE  MAN  ON  HORSEBACK  37 

over  a  city  as  quiet  as  a  countryside  after  a  thunder  shower. 
After  years  of  turbulence  Paris  had  met  her  master.  In 
that  crowded  hour,  she  had  seen  him  here,  there  and  every^- 
where,  his  long  hair  falling  over  his  shoulders,  his  thin  boyish 
figure  wreathed  in  the  smoke  of  his  cannon,  but  not  yet  know- 
ing even  the  name  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  she  spoke  of  the 
mysterious  stranger  only  as  "the  man  on  horseback." 


CHAPTER  V 
A  LOVE  STORY 

WHILE  all  Paris  was  bowing  before  the  victor  of 
Vendemiaire  in  1795,  the  conqueror  himself  was 
conquered  and  the  little  artilleryman  was  van- 
quished by  the  little  bowman. 

Piloted  by  fortune  from  opposite  ends  of  the  earth,  one 
from  the  old  world,  the  other  from  the  new,  one  from  an 
island  in  the  Mediterranean,  the  other  from  an  island  in  the 
Caribbean,  a  boy  and  a  girl,  a  Corsican  and  a  Creole,  Na- 
poleon and  Josephine,  landed  on  the  shore  of  France  in 
1778-79,  the  boy  to  enter  a  school  for  the  youthful  nobility, 
the  girl  to  be  the  bride  of  a  nobleman. 

After  five  years  both  were  in  Paris,  but  as  effectually  di- 
vided by  the  narrow  Seine  as  when  in  childhood  the  wide 
seas  rolled  between  them.  Leaving  the  capital,  the  Corsican 
returned  to  his  native  land,  the  Creole  to  hers,  only  to  be 
caught,  both  of  them,  in  the  wide-spreading  whirlpool  of  the 
Revolution  and  drawn  together  at  its  centre. 

Once  more  in  France,  but  still  unknown  to  each  other,  they 
drifted  about  for  two  or  three  years  without  crossing  paths. 
The  Reign  of  Terror  came,  and  while  Napoleon  was  winning 
his  first  laurels  under  Robespierre  at  Toulon,  Josephine  was 
thrown  into  prison  and  her  husband  sent  to  the  guillotine. 
With  Robespierre's  fall  they  changed  places,  the  prison  door 
swinging  open  for  Josephine  and  closing  in  upon  Napoleon. 

Thus  for  fifteen  years  did  prankish  fortune  sport  with 
this  pair. 

Josephine's  life  was  filled  with  vicissitudes  not  less  strange 
than  Napoleon's.  She  was  descended  from  a  family  of  the 
poor  country  nobility  of  France  which  had  emigrated  to  the 

38 


A  LOVE  STORY  39 

island  of  Martinique  less  than  forty  years  before  her  birth. 
Her  father,  a  plodding,  unambitious  sugar  planter  of  Trois 
Islets,  across  the  bay  from  Fort  de  France,  compromised  with 
his  disappointment  when  a  girl  was  born  to  him  by  giving 
her  a  half  boyish  name:  Marie  Joseph  Rose  Tascher  de  la 
Pagerie.    But  her  mother  called  her  Yvette. 

When  the  little  Creole  was  only  three,  a  West  Indian  hurri- 
cane swept  away  her  home  while  the  family  hid  in  a  cave, 
and  nothing  was  left  but  the  kitchen  wing  to  mark  her  birth- 
place. The  father  could  not  afford  to  rebuild  and,  picking 
up  such  pieces  of  furniture  as  he  could  find  in  the  wreckage, 
he  moved  his  family  into  the  loft  of  his  sugar  mill. 

There  Josephine  grew  up,  care-free  and  happy  as  her  black 
playmates,  a  troop  of  little  slaves  arrayed  in  the  livery  of 
the  burnished  sun.  Books  and  lessons  troubled  her  not  at  all, 
and  her  only  schooling  was  received  in  two  or  three  terms  at 
a  convent  in  Fort  de  France. 

Trois  Islets  had  no  social  life  to  restrain  her  with  its  for- 
malities and  vanities.  "I  ran,  I  jumped,  I  danced  from 
morning  till  night, ' '  was  her  own  description  of  her  girlhood. 
Not  even  the  prophecy  she  had  heard  pronounced  in  the  hut 
of  a  fortune  teller  cast  a  shadow  upon  this  daughter  of  the 
sun.  Yet  had  she  not  been  warned  by  the  black  prophetess 
that  one  day  she  would  be  greater  than  queen  and  after  hav- 
ing two  crowns,  lose  both? 

Before  Josephine  was  born,  the  Marquis  de  Beauhamais 
v;as  the  royal  governor  of  the  Island  of  ]\Iartinique,  and  in 
the  government  house  at  Fort  de  France  his  son,  the  Viscount 
Alexandre  de  Beauharnais,  was  born.  Josephine  had  an  aunt, 
IMme.  Renaudine,  and  no  doubt  it  was  her  matchmaking  am- 
bition which  inspired  the  Marquis  with  the  idea  of  marrying 
his  son,  the  Viscount,  to  a  daughter  of  the  poor  and  undistin- 
guished colonial  planter  of  Trois  Islets.  After  he  had  re- 
turned to  Paris,  the  Marquis  wrote  back  to  the  Taschers  pro- 
posing the  marriage,  but  the  hand  of  a  younger  daughter  was 
requested,  because  Josephine  was  too  near  the  boy 's  age,  which 
was  seventeen. 

While  that  letter  was  on  its  slow  way  this  second  daughter 


40  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

died,  but  INI.  Tascher  rose  to  the  emergency  like  a  bom  diplo- 
mat. After  recording  her  death  in  his  reply  to  the  ]\Iarquis 
he  affected  to  offer  the  third  daughter,  who  was  not  yet  twelve. 
Then  he  added  in  a  sly  postscript  that  he  feared  Josephine 
would  be  put  out  by  her  omission  from  the  journey  to  France 
and  that  he  wished  he  could  send  both  girls.  "But  how  can 
I  separate  a  mother  from  her  two  remaining  daughters,  so 
soon  after  the  third  has  been  snatched  from  her  by  death?" 

By  this  time  the  JMarquis  notified  M,  Tascher  to  send  over 
whichever  girl  he  pleased  and  even  sent  authority  for  the 
announcement  of  the  banns  at  Fort  de  France,  generously 
leaving  a  blank  line  for  the  name  of  the  bride.  Of  course 
Josephine's  name  was  inserted,  and  on  this  left-handed  invi- 
tation, she  sailed  for  France  in  the  company  of  her  father, 
landing  at  Brest  with  her  doll  in  her  arms. 

This  not  being  a  love  story  it  is  well  to  finish  it  speedily. 
Alexandre  and  Josephine  were  married  and  went  to  live  in 
the  town  and  country  mansions  of  the  Beauhamais.  Utterly 
unsuited  and  useless  to  each  other,  the  Viscount  happily  could 
stay  away  much  of  the  time  with  the  army,  while  Josephine 
took  captive  all  her  new  and  distinguished  relatives,  including 
the  Kochefaucaulds,  the  ]\Iontmorencys  and  the  Rohans.  Al- 
though she  never  had  entered  a  drawing  room  or  dined  in 
state,  her  native  grace  and  taste,  with  a  little  coaching  by  her 
aunt,  saved  her. 

The  birth  of  a  son,  Eugene,  and  later  the  coming  of  a 
daughter,  Hortense,  did  not  recall  Alexandre  to  his  fireside 
for  long.  After  seeking  diversion  in  the  army,  in  Italy  and 
even  in  Martinique,  where  he  said  very  disagreeable  things 
about  his  wife,  there  came  a  legal  separation  and  the  dividing 
up  of  the  children.  The  father  took  Eugene,  and  Josephine 
with  her  baby  girl  returned  to  the  loft  of  the  sugar  mill  of 
Trois  Islets. 

"VNTiile  she  was  renewing  the  memories  of  her  childhood 
there,  the  Revolution  burst  upon  France  and  the  Viscount 
plunged  into  the  movement.  In  the  awakening  of  his  emo- 
tions, he  felt  a  desire  to  be  reconciled  with  Josephine,  who, 
although  he  had  branded  her  a  ' '  vile  creature, ' '  listened  as  a 


JOSEPHIXK,     BY     PRUIJ'HOX 


A  LOVE  STORY  41 

wife  and  mother  to  his  appeals  for  her  return  to  him  and 
Eugene.  Against  the  protests  of  her  father,  who  was  already 
in  his  mortal  illness,  and  to  the  lasting  displeasure  of  her 
mother,  she  sailed  for  France. 

The  reunited  family  shared  the  fortunes  of  Citizen  Beau- 
harnais  through  three  stormy  years.  Twice  he  was  chosen 
to  be  president  of  the  national  assembly,  and  he  rode  the  wild 
waves  of  political  agitation  very  well  until  he  was  sent  out  as 
commander-in-chief  of  the  Army  of  the  Rhine.  His  campaign 
failing,  he  was  recalled  to  Paris  and  cast  into  prison.  While 
Josephine  was  interceding  for  his  life,  at  the  height  of  the 
Great  Terror,  she  herself  was  arrested  and  locked  up  as  a 
disloyal  aristocrat. 

The  Terror  had  converted  the  palaces  and  monasteries  into 
prisons  and  crowded  them  with  the  proudest  and  meanest  of 
France.  Beauharnais  was  confined  in  the  palace  of  the  Lux- 
embourg and  his  wife  was  almost  across  the  street  in  the  Car- 
melite Monastery. 

Between  the  Luxembourg  and  the  familiar  Theatre  de 
rOdeon  on  the  Rue  Vaugirard  rises  still  the  chapel  of  Jo- 
sephine's prison,  the  Church  of  St.  Joseph  des  Carmes.  Down 
in  its  crypt  one  may  see  to-day  mementoes  of  the  horrible 
massacre  of  the  prisoners  which  took  place  at  the  monastery  in 
the  September  before  her  arrest,  and  many  tombs  of  those 
who  were  butchered  in  the  Hundred  Hours  of  bloody  memory. 

Beauharnais  was  permitted  to  pay  a  parting  visit  to  his 
wife.  Then  his  last  day  came,  and  he  bought  back  from  the 
barber  who  prepared  his  head  for  the  guillotine,  a  lock  of  his 
hair  to  send  to  Josephine  and  the  children.  The  wife  made 
ready  to  follow  her  husband  to  the  scaffold,  and  she  wrote  her 
farewell  letter  to  Eugene  and  Hortense.  But  just  then 
Robespierre  himself  was  flimg  into  the  tumbril  of  death  and 
the  prison  doors  swung  open. 

Josephine  returned  to  the  world  as  from  her  grave,  the 
widowed  and  penniless  mother  of  two  children.  Almost  noth- 
ing really  is  known  of  her  eighteen  months  of  widowhood, 
though  much  has  been  told,  mostly  in  such  a  venomous  spirit 
that  a  prudent  person  dare  not  touch  it.     From  the  beginning 


42  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

to  the  end  of  that  precarious  period  she  was  continually  draw- 
ing upon  her  mother,  now  a  widow  like  herself.  She  threw 
herself  upon  her  bounty  as  ' '  my  sole  support, ' '  and  again  she 
wrote  her  as  her  "poor  Yvette:"  "I  know  too  well  your 
regard  for  my  honour  to  have  the  least  doubt  that  you  %vill 
supply  me  with  the  means  for  subsistence." 

At  last  came  the  day  of  Vendemiaire,  big  with  fate,  when 
from  the  cannon's  mouth  the  little  artilleryman  spoke  to  re- 
bellious Paris  and  it  paused  in  the  presence  of  its  master,  * '  the 
man  on  horseback."  The  wilful  city  was  commanded  to  give 
up  its  arms  as  a  guarantee  of  good  behaviour  in  the  future, 
and  the  soldiers  went  from  house  to  house  to  take  away  the 
weapons  of  the  insurgent  population.  The  widow  Beau- 
harnais,  wishing  to  keep  her  husband's  sword  as  a  heritage 
for  her  fourteen-year-old  son,  sent  Eugene  to  headquarters  to 
beg  its  return. 

So  the  tale  was  told  by  both  Napoleon  and  Eugene,  and 
if  it  is  too  good  to  be  true  it  is  also  too  good  to  be  spoiled  by 
sceptics  who  have  no  story  to  take  its  place. 

The  boy  wept  at  the  sight  of  his  father's  sword  and  kissed 
its  hilt.  Napoleon  was  touched  and  patted  him  on  the  head. 
Eugene's  enthusiastic  report  at  home  of  the  General's  kind- 
ness excited  the  gratitude  of  his  widowed  mother,  who  has- 
tened to  call  and  express  her  thanks. 

Although  she  was  announced  as  "the  Citizeness  Beauhar- 
nais,"  the  rustic  nobleman  from  Corsica  did  not  miss  the  im- 
pressive fact  that  his  caller  was  the  Viscountess  de  Beau- 
hamais,  a  resounding  name  of  the  ancient  regime.  He  saw 
in  her  the  graceful  impersonation  of  the  great  aristocracy 
of  old  France,  and  felt  that  for  the  first  time  he  stood  in  the 
presence  of  a  grande  dame. 

Did  she  not  look  the  part  to  perfection  ?  Regally  tall  and 
charmingly  slender,  not  even  a  girdle  was  needed  to  support 
her  dainty  bosom;  her  eyes  were  soft  and  appealing;  her 
sensitive  little  nose  was  retroussee,  or  turned  up,  as  we  ungal- 
lantly  say  in  English.  Parisian  art  had  cleverly  repelled  the 
assaults  of  time,  and  her  arching  mouth  was  so  small  that  it 
did  not  permit  her  unfortunate  teeth  to  obtrude  themselves 


A  LOVE  STORY  43 

upon  her  enchanting  smile,  while  in  her  every  motion  there 
was  the  languorous  ease  of  the  Creole  and  the  highly  polished 
grace  of  the  French  salon. 

The  enraptured  Corsiean  did  not  yet  know  that  she  was 
only  a  little  islander  like  himself,  and  as  fast  as  his  new  car- 
riage could  take  him  on  the  field  of  action,  the  strategist  of 
Toulon  opened  a  campaign  in  which  a  widow's  strategy  was 
to  leave  him  as  helpless  as  a  child. 

The  tide  in  his  affairs  was  swiftly  swelling  to  the  flood. 
Already  he  was  General -in-chief  of  the  Army  of  the  Interior, 
and,  as  the  commandant  of  Paris,  he  dwelt  in  an  old  palace 
on  the  Rue  Capucine,  where  he  had  a  salon  of  his  own.  In 
his  bearing,  dejection  had  given  way  to  confidence.  Slapping 
the  sword  at  his  side,  he  boasted  to  Josephine  that  it  would 
carry  him  far.  She  smiled  at  his  self-assurance  as  something 
drolly  boyish,  and  the  wild  outbursts  of  his  natural  egotism, 
which  he  had  so  long  been  obliged  to  repress  or  restrain,  must 
have  kept  her  oscillating  between  suspicions  of  his  genius  and 
his  madness. 

After  her  observation  of  the  evanescent  quality  of  military 
reputations  and  the  transitory  character  of  personal  success 
under  the  Republic  well  may  she  have  hesitated  to  hitch  her 
wagon  to  the  star  of  this  youth.  Had  she  not  buckled  on 
the  armour  of  one  General-in-chief  only  to  see  him  march 
straight  to  the  guillotine  whither  half  her  friends  had  gone? 

The  attempts  of  her  wooer  to  carry  the  fortress  of  her  affec- 
tions by  storm  were  a  tactical  failure.  Her  heart  when  it  was 
young  had  been  impervious  to  the  assaults  of  passion,  and  now 
at  thirty-two  it  was  untouched  by  the  Corsiean 's  frenzied 
attacks  upon  it.  In  fine,  she  seems  to  have  been  at  once  terri- 
fied and  fascinated  by  her  pet  eagle.  But  if  she  let  him  fly 
away  she  knew  how  to  call  him  back,  as  in  this  example : 

You  no  longer  come  to  see  a  friend  who  loves  you ;  you  have  quite 
forsaken  her ;  you  are  very  wrong ;  for  she  is  passionately  devoted  to 
you. 

Come  to-morrow  and  breakfast  with  me;  I  want  to  see  you  and  to 
chat  with  you  upon  matters  concerning  your  interest. 

Good  night,  my  friend,  I  embrace  you.        Veuve  Beauharnais. 


44  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  courtship  went  forward  at  an  ever  quickening  pace. 
It  took  the  high  speed  as  the  Directory,  moved  toward  its 
decision  to  make  the  wooer  the  General-in-chief  of  the  Army 
of  Italy.  Aunt  Renaudine  and  Aunt  Fanny  Beauharnais  and 
Josephine's  father-in-law,  the  IMarquis,  filed  their  approval  of 
the  alliance,  and  then  it  was  time  to  call  in  the  lawyer,  which 
is  always  the  signal  in  France  that  the  love  making  has  come 
to  a  crisis. 

Napoleon  was  with  his  sweetheart  when  the  lawyer  arrived. 
But  Maitre  Raguideau  paid  no  attention  to  the  insignificant 
young  man,  who  was  idly  looking  out  the  window  as  he  passed 
into  Josephine's  chamber,  where  she  was  still  in  bed,  and  the 
lawyer  remonstrated  with  his  client  so  earnestly  that  the  lover 
standing  by  the  window  heard  through  the  partly  open  door 
some  of  his  exclamatory  protests:  "You  are  very  foolish! 
You  will  regret  it !  It  is  madness !  You  are  going  to  marry 
a  man  who  has  nothing  but  a  cloak  and  a  sword.  Surely  you 
can  make  a  much  better  match  than  this ! ' ' 

But  Josephine  had  passed  the  stage  of  argument,  and  she 
laughingly  called  in  Napoleon,  who  rose  to  the  occasion  by 
complimenting  ]\Iaitre  Raguideau  on  his  frankness  and 
promptly  retaining  him  as  their  joint  lawyer!  Yet  in  the 
making  of  the  marriage  settlement  he  frankly  confessed  that 
he  had  no  real  estate  and  no  personal  estate  other  than  his 
military  uniforms  and  trappings. 

When  the  wedding  night  came,  the  couple  drove  to  the 
mairie,  unattended  by  a  representative  of  either  the  bride's 
family  or  the  groom's.  The  wedding  place,  which  is  the  one 
spared  monument  of  the  marriage  of  Napoleon  and  Josephine, 
has  become  a  bank  and  is  as  unromantically  fiscal  in  its  ap- 
pearance as  any  bank  could  be.  But  this  long,  low,  greyish 
yellow  building  around  the  corner  from  the  Avenue  de 
1 'Opera,  in  the  Rue  d'Antin,  has  seen  gayer  days,  for  it  has 
not  always  been  the  Paris  and  Nederlands  Bank.  It  was  a 
palace  in  the  gilt  age  of  the  Grand  Monarch  and  until  it  was 
confiscated  in  the  Revolution.  Then  it  became  the  mairie  of 
the  second  arrondissement,  the  municipal  building  of  the  sec- 
ond ward. 


A  LOVE  STORY  45 

On  the  walls  of  the  bank  office  on  the  second  floor  the  cupids 
still  frolic  in  a  golden  frieze.  They  danced  at  the  mating  of 
the  widow  when  the  soldier  endowed  her  with  all  his  worldly 
possessions,  to  wit: 

One  sword. 
One  cloak. 

For  that  room,  in  which  now  are  only  desks  and  office  stools, 
was  the  salle  des  marriages  when  Napoleon  led  his  betrothed 
up  the  stairs  at  ten  o'clock  of  a  March  evening  in  1796.  The 
little  bridal  party  was  late  for  its  appointment  and  the  Mayor 
had  fallen  asleep  in  his  chair.  Napoleon  went  over  to  him 
and  shook  him  by  the  shoulder.  "Wake  up!  "Wake  up,  Mr. 
Mayor,  and  marry  us!"  he  commanded. 

The  marriage  rite  appears  not  to  have  been  taken  very  seri- 
ously but  to  have  been  an  occasion  for  some  merry  pranks 
with  the  facts.  The  bride  gave  her  age  as  twenty-eight,  in- 
stead of  thirty-two  plus,  and  the  groom  met  her  half-way  in 
a  gallant  effort  to  bridge  the  gulf  of  years  between  them  by 
vowing  he  was  born  in  the  same  year. 

From  the  Rue  d'Antin,  the  bride  took  her  husband  to  her 
rented  house,  a  modest  place  set  in  a  garden  in  the  Rue 
Chantereine,  which  he  would  soon  turn  into  the  Rue  de  la 
Victoire.  And  it  was  only  six  or  eight  squares  to  the  Tuile- 
ries! 

The  Rue  de  la  Victoire  to-day  is  one  of  a  thousand  streets 
of  Paris,  with  its  shops  on  the  ground  floor  and  its  flats  above. 
Josephine's  little  hotel,  the  first  home  Napoleon  knew  after 
leaving  his  mother's  roof,  is  gone;  but  around  every  lamp  post 
in  the  Rue  de  la  Victoire  cluster  the  memories  of  the  victor  of 
Italy  and  his  drawn  battle  with  the  widow,  not  to  dwell  upon 
his  inglorious  capitulation  to  her  dog,  Fortune,  who  disputed 
with  his  teeth  the  invasion  of  his  mistress'  boudoir. 

After  a  honeymoon  of  only  two  days  the  bridegroom  ex- 
changed the  pursuit  of  happiness  for  the  pursuit  of  glory, 
leaving  his  bride  twirling  her  second  wedding  ring,  within 
which  were  engraved  the  watchwords,  "Au  Destin!" 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  LITTLE  CORPORAL 

1796     AGE   26 

FOR  a  week  before  his  wedding,  Napoleon  had  carried 
in  his  pocket  his  commission  as  General-in-chief  of  the 
Army  of  Italy.  When  his  honeymoon  was  only  two 
days  old,  opportunity  and  fame  refused  longer  to  be  put  off 
and  sternly  commanded  him  to  quit  the  path  of  dalliance. 

As  he  went  sighing  to  his  new  post  of  duty  in  March,  1796, 
he  scattered  a  shower  of  love  letters  along  his  way  for  760 
miles.  At  nearly  every  change  of  horses  the  young  General- 
in-chief  hurried  to  a  tavern  table  and  sought  to  relieve  the 
inflammation  from  cupid's  wound  which  was  consuming  his 
breast,  by  writing  a  fiery  message  to  the  bride  he  had  left 
behind  him. 

At  the  same  time,  his  orders  were  flying  on  ahead  of  him 
and  falling  like  snowflakes  on  his  army,  whose  veteran  gen- 
erals were  shocked  when  the  frowzy  headed  little  commander 
presented  himself  at  headquarters  and  with  juvenile  ardour 
showed  them  the  portrait  of  his  bride.  ' '  But  a  moment  after- 
wards the  boy  put  on  a  general's  hat  and  seemed  to  have 
grown  two  feet,"  said  Massena,  who  had  been  a  soldier  seven- 
teen years.  "He  questioned  us  as  to  the  position  of  our 
divisions  and  as  to  the  effective  force  of  each  corps,  told  us 
the  course  which  we  were  to  take,  announced  that  he  would 
hold  an  inspection  the  next  day  and  attack  the  enemy  the 
day  after." 

Why  should  the  Republic  of  France  have  staked  its  for- 
tunes in  a  war  with  the  greatest  empire  of  the  time  on  this 
youth  of  twenty-six  in  the  throes  of  his  first  love?  Why 
should  it  have  chosen  for  the  highest  command  a  young  man 

46 


THE  LITTLE  CORPORAL  47 

who  had  preferred  philosophy,  literature,  politics,  business, 
anything  to  military  service,  who  had  been  absent  from  duty 
more  than  half  the  ten  years  he  had  held  a  commission  in  the 
army,  and  been  twice  dismissed?  Why  should  it  have  ele- 
vated above  his  seniors  an  officer  who  never  had  held  a  com- 
mand and  who  never  had  been  in  an  active  campaign  or  seen 
more  than  one  battle  ? 

Simply  because  he  had  an  idea! 

His  commission  as  General-in-chief  of  the  Army  of  Italy 
had  been  won  not  by  his  sword,  but  by  the  keen  edge  of  his 
wits;  not  by  his  whiff  of  grapeshot  on  the  13th  Vendemiaire 
nor  yet  by  his  cannonading  at  Toulon,  but  with  pen  and  paper 
at  his  desk  in  Paris,  where  he  had  drawn  up  a  brilliant  scheme 
of  war  and  statecraft  combined. 

An  Austrian  army  was  ready  for  the  invasion  of  France 
and  operating  with  the  army  of  the  most  martial  of  the  Italian 
states,  the  kingdom  of  Sardinia,  whose  territory  stretched 
from  the  Lake  of  Geneva  over  the  Alps  and  down  into  the 
Plain  of  Piedmont.  Napoleon  proposed  that  the  French 
forces,  which  held  only  that  naiTow  strip  of  ]\Iediterraneau 
coast  which  is  known  as  the  Riviera,  should  proceed  through 
a  pass  in  the  mountains  that  lay  between  them  and  the  enemy, 
divide  the  allied  armies,  compel  the  Sardinians  separately  to 
make  peace  and  then  drive  the  Austrians  out  of  Lombardy, 
which  they  had  held  for  eighty  years. 

Arrived  at  Savona  he  found  an  army  of  some  forty  thou- 
sand men  in  rags,  their  feet  on  the  ground  and  many  of  them 
without  bayonets,  confronted  by  a  well  set-up  enemy  with 
60,000  soldiers.  The  new  French  commander,  without  means 
to  feed  or  clothe  or  equip  them  for  a  campaign,  sought  at 
once  to  distract  the  thoughts  of  the  men  from  their  wretched 
condition  by  promising  them  the  spoils  of  victory.  That  first 
ringing  proclamation  disclosed  the  ''lion's  paw"  that  some 
one  has  said  marked  all  his  messages  to  his  troops : 

Soldiers:  You  are  naked,  badly  fed;  the  government  owes  you 
much ;  it  can  give  you  nothing.  Your  long  suffering,  the  courage  you 
show  among  these  crags  are  splendid,  but  they  bring  you  no  glory; 
not  a  ray  is  reflected  upon  you. 


48  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

I  wish  to  lead  you  into  the  most  fertile  plains  in  the  world !  Rich 
provinces,  great  towns  will  be  in  your  power;  there  you  will  find 
honour,  gloiy  and  riches ! 

Soldiers  of  Italy,  can  you  be  found  lacking  in  honour,  courage  or 
constancy  ? 

From  Nice  to  Genoa  there  rises  a  long  mountainous  range' 
with  its  head  in  the  clouds  and  its  feet  in  the  surf  of  the  Medi- 
terranean, This  is  the  wall  of  Italy.  In  all  that  wall  there 
are  only  four  or  five  gates,  one  of  which  opens  at  Savona. 
But  Napoleon  fooled  the  enemy  by  noisily  demanding  from 
the  government  of  Genoa  a  free  highway  through  another  pass 
twenty  miles  to  the  east. 

Beaulieu,  the  seventy-one-year-old  Austrian  commander, 
when  he  heard  of  that  demand  on  Genoa,  flattered  himself  he 
saw  through  the  young  man's  scheme  as  clearly  as  through 
the  rungs  of  a  ladder.  The  boy  was  trying  to  steal  around 
him,  and  the  veteran  commander  at  once  began  to  move  his 
main  force  toward  the  east  to  head  off  the  French.  Then 
Napoleon  shot  his  main  force  like  a  bolt  at  the  weakened 
centre  of  the  allied  armies. 

Riding  out  of  Savona  at  midnight,  he  climbed  twelve  miles 
in  the  shadows  of  the  towering  crags  of  the  Ligurian  Alps, 
crowned  by  church  steeples  and  ancient  villages,  each  a  refuge 
of  civilisation  in  the  dark  ages  when  the  corsairs  of  the  Sara- 
cens were  the  terror  of  the  shore.  That  steep  road  is  the  first 
section  in  Napoleon's  ladder  to  fame. 

As  the  day  broke  that  April  morning  over  the  heights  of 
Montenotte,  the  soldiers  of  the  Austrian  right  opened  their 
eyes  upon  the  blue  coats  of  France  before  them  in  overwhelm- 
ing force.  The  clash  of  battle  reverberating  among  the  moun- 
tains reached  the  ears  of  Beaulieu,  miles  away,  where  he  was 
leading  the  left  wing  of  his  army  toward  the  pretended  point 
of  attack. 

He  awakened  too  late  to  the  humiliating  fact  that  the  boy 
had  played  a  trick  on  him.  In  vain  he  put  forth  every  effort 
to  unite  his  forces,  join  his  ally  and  present  a  solid  front  to 
the  French. 

* '  My  nobility  dates  from  Montenotte, ' '  Napoleon  boasted  in 


THE  LITTLE  CORPORAL  49 

all  the  after  years,  as  he  looked  back  upon  that  first  battle  and 
first  victory  under  his  generalship. 

Like  an  agile  boxer  sparring  witii  two  antagonists  at  once, 
he  fell  upon  the  Sardinians  the  very  next  day,  and  drove  them 
back.  His  army  now  stood  like  a  wedge  between  the  two 
allies  and  stronger  than  either  alone.  In  strict  accordance 
with  the  schedule  he  had  drawn  up  at  his  desk  in  Paris,  he 
had  separated  the  Austrians  and  the  Sardinians, 

'  *  Hannibal  crossed  the  Alps, ' '  he  reminded  his  troops ;  ' '  we 
have  turned  them. ' ' 

Always  with  a  lesser  force  than  the  enemy,  he  won  his 
Italian  victories  by  his  ability  to  send  more  men  into  battle 
than  his  opponent.  If  he  adopted  Voltaire's  cynical  remark 
that  ' '  God  is  on  the  side  of  the  heaviest  battalions, ' '  he  really 
meant  no  more  than  that  God  is  on  the  side  of  the  man  whom 
he  has  endued  with  the  wisdom  to  assemble  the  heaviest  bat- 
talions at  the  point  of  attack.  "An  army  should  be  divided 
for  subsistence  and  concentrated  for  combat."  That  was  the 
keynote  of  his  success  throughout  all  his  campaigns. 

After  pushing  the  Sardinian  army  back  on  Turin,  Napoleon 
had  hardly  sat  down  in  the  fine  Salmatori  Palace  at  Cherasco, 
thirty-five  miles  from  the  capital,  when  an  old  Sardinian 
marshal  made  his  appearance,  and  announced  to  the  little 
commander  of  the  French  that  his  King  was  thinking  of  pro- 
posing terms  of  peace.  "Terms,"  roared  the  young  man,  as 
he  pounded  a  desk,  "it  is  I  who  name  terms;  accept  them  at 
once  or  Turin  is  mine  to-morrow ! ' ' 

"When  the  Sardinians  tried  to  haggle  with  him  he  pulled 
out  his  watch,  and  tapping  its  face  with  his  finger  commanded 
them  to  sign  at  once.  ' '  I  may  lose  battles,  but  I  will  not  lose 
minutes." 

It  was  not  long  before  Murat  was  speeding  on  the  way  to 
Paris  with  the  complete  surrender  of  the  kingdom  of  Sar- 
dinia— and  with  a  letter  to  Josephine,  clamorous  and  threat- 
ening, because  she  had  not  taken  wings  and  flown  across  the 
Alps.  "Why  do  you  not  come  to  me?"  the  bridegroom  de- 
manded. "  If  it  is  a  lover  that  detains  you,  beware  of  Othello 's 
dagger!" 


50  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

This  outburst  of  the  twenty-six-year-old  Corsican  amused 
the  thirty-two-year-old  Creole  immensely,  and  she  read  the 
passage  to  the  poet  Arnault — she  delighted  to  show  Napoleon 's 
love  letters — and  Arnault  said  in  his  old  age:  "I  seem  to 
hear  her  once  more  say,  with  her  Creole  accent,  while  she 
smiles,  'How  funny  Bonaparte  is.'  " 

Sardinia  pledged  herself  to  forsake  the  alliance  with  Austria 
and  to  disperse  her  army,  and  she  ceded  Savoy  and  Nice  to 
France  outright.  Napoleon  loudly  insisted  on  stipulating  also 
that  in  pursuit  of  the  Austrians  he  should  be  permitted  to 
cross  the  River  Po  at  a  certain  point.  Beaulieu,  of  course, 
heard  of  this  just  as  he  had  heard  of  the  demand  on  Genoa 
for  a  free  road  through  the  easterly  pass  and  he  rose  to  the 
bait  with  the  same  eagerness,  while  Napoleon  marched  his 
army  100  miles  down  stream  and  crossed  where  there  were 
only  200  or  300  Austrians  to  be  frightened  off  the  scene.  He 
was  not  only  over  the  river,  but  getting  in  behind  the  enemy, 
who  hurriedly  fell  back. 

From  the  Po,  he  pressed  on  to  the  Adda  and  its  now  cele- 
brated bridge  at  Lodi.  This  little  city  which  lies  twenty  miles 
from  Milan  seems  little  changed  by  time.  There  is  only  a 
picturesque  vestige  of  the  old  town  wall  with  its  mossy  bricks 
and  the  grass  growing  on  its  top.  But  even  when  this  barrier 
stood  intact,  it  did  not  prove  a  serious  obstacle  to  the  French, 
who  fairly  took  the  town  with  their  bare  hands,  the  rear  guard 
of  the  Austrians  fleeing  out  the  other  side  by  the  bridge  over 
the  Adda. 

On  the  narrow  but  pleasant  and  clean  main  street  of  the 
village,  which  now  has  a  population  of  20,000,  still  stands  the 
big  old  Pitletti  palace  where  Napoleon  made  his  headquarters. 
The  historic  bridge,  however,  has  been  replaced  by  a  somewhat 
wider  structure,  300  or  400  feet  long,  but  a  tablet  on  a  wall 
near  by  records  the  deed  which  immortalised  its  name.  The 
Austrians  intended  to  destroy  the  bridge  after  crossing  the 
river,  but  the  French  were  so  close  on  their  heels  that  they 
could  only  turn  and  resist  with  their  artillery  the  passage  of 
their  pursuers. 

The  clock  tower  of  the  church  of  the  Magdalena  rises  by 


THE  LITTLE  CORPORAL  51 

the  river  side  unchanged  since  Napoleon  climbed  to  its  top  and 
looked  across  the  shallow  stream  which  dribbled  between  him 
and  the  Austriaus  that  May  afternoon.  While  he  stood  in  the 
tower,  watching  the  futile  cannonading  between  his  own  forces 
and  the  enemy,  the  clock  clanged  five,  again  it  sounded  six,  and 
then  he  determined  to  take  the  bridge  by  storm. 

The  grenadiers,  with  shouts  of  ' '  Vive  la  Republique, ' '  dashed 
upon  it  behind  a  battalion  of  carbineers  and  into  a  hail  of 
grape  and  canister  from  the  Austrian  guns.  The  carbineers 
fell  in  heaps,  and  the  gi-enadiers  paused  before  this  ghastly 
barricade.  While  they  hesitated,  several  officers,  Lannes,  first 
of  all,  and  then  Massena,  Berthier,  Cervoni  and  others  with 
waving  swords,  rushed  by  them,  leaped  over  the  stricken  car- 
bineers, and  led  the  grenadiers  into  the  very  mouths  of  the 
Austrian  guns.  The  gunners  were  bayoneted,  every  gun  was 
captured  and  the  enemy  put  to  flight. 

It  was  in  the  twilight  when  Napoleon  rode  out  of  the  town 
to  visit  the  camp  of  his  army.  Dismounting,  he  sauntered  up 
to  a  group  of  captured  officers.  They  did  not  recognise  the 
young  French  officer,  who  asked  them  how  their  army  was  get- 
ting along.  An  Austrian  captain  replied,  "Not  very  well. 
But  then  this  young  general  of  yours  is  violating  every  rule 
of  military  operations.  We  never  know  where  to  find  him. 
Sometimes  he  is  in  front  of  us,  sometimes  in  our  rear  and 
again  on  our  flank.  We  can't  tell  how  to  place  ourselves. 
This  way  of  making  war  is  outrageous." 

Napoleon  passed  on  from  the  prisoners  to  his  grenadiers, 
who  cheered  him  fervently.  Plainly  he  had  touched  their 
imagination  when  he  hurled  them  upon  the  smoking  cannon 
of  the  foe.  They  had  promptly  held  a  council,  as  they  were 
in  the  habit  of  doing  when  anything  was  happening,  and  they 
decided  to  promote  him.  Wlierefore  they  acclaimed  him  now 
by  the  new  title  which  they  had  admiringly  conferred  upon 
him,  "The  Little  Corporal!" 


CHAPTER  VII 

IN  THE  COCKPIT  OF  EUROPE 

1796     AGE  26-27 

WHEN  the  passenger  on  the  train  from  Milan  to 
Venice  has  looked  out  for  an  hour  or  more  upon  a 
quiet  and  fruitful  plain,  where  the  stately  poplars 
of  Lombardy  stretch  skyward  to  rival  the  noble  bell  towers 
of  the  village  churches,  he  sees  the  landscape  abruptly  change 
from  smiling  peace  to  frowning  war.  Ugly  wrinkles  suddenly 
disfigure  the  face  of  the  countryside  where  many  redoubts 
furrow  the  earth,  and  grey,  moated  forts  and  battlemented 
citadels  lift  their  scowling  fronts  on  every  hand.  One  long 
chain  of  fortifications  stretches  seventy-five  miles  to  Legnano 
and  southward  twenty-five  miles  from  Verona  and  Lonato  to 
the  mouldy  walls  of  Mantua.  Within  that  roped  arena  lies 
the  great  battleground  of  Italy,  which  Freeman  christened 
"the  cockpit  of  Europe." 

Wlien  he  had  dashed  across  the  bridge  of  Lodi  in  May,  1796, 
Napoleon  stood  in  that  cockpit,  and  there  he  cast  his  gauntlet 
at  the  feet  of  Austria  on  the  Lombardy  plain.  Fooling  his 
ever  gullible  foe,  he  passed  over  the  Mincio  as  he  had  crossed 
the  Po  and  the  Alps,  by  making  a  pretended  movement  in 
almost  the  opposite  direction  to  his  real  line  of  advance. 

Beaulieu's  resistance  thus  was  brought  to  an  end,  and  the 
young  chieftain  entered  upon  the  siege  of  Mantua  with  its 
garrison  of  13,000  or  15,000  Austrians.  This  was  an  irksome 
task  for  his  impetuous  nature.  "The  success  of  a  siege,"  he 
scornfully  remarked,  "depends  upon  nothing  but  luck,  a  dog 
or  a  goose."  Leaving  a  patient  watch  dog  among  the  generals 
to  sit  down  in  front  of  Mantua,  his  restless  spirit  turned  to 
the  more  congenial  work  of  preparing  to  meet  a  new  army 
which  Austria  was  hastily  organising  to  send  against  his 
wearied  troops. 

52 


IN  THE  COCKPIT  OF  EUROPE        53 

Between  the  Austrian  frontier  and  Mantua  there  stretched 
in  those  days  the  territory  of  the  old  republic  of  Venice. 
Across  that  supposedly  neutral  ground  Austria  had  a  right  of 
way  into  Lorabardy,  but  Napoleon  had  none  into  Austria.  She 
was  free  to  descend  upon  him  unmolested,  but  he  must  not  go 
forth  to  meet  her. 

Catching  some  Austrians  straying  off  their  prescribed  path 
through  Venetia,  however,  he  ignored  the  jug-handled  neu- 
trality of  Venice  and  soon  both  armies  overran  the  land  of  the 
Doges.  Seizing  the  Venetian  city  of  Verona,  which  is  seated 
on  both  banks  of  the  Adige,  he  held  the  key  to  the  Austrian 
Tyrol  and,  spreading  his  army  along  the  shapely  foot  of  lovely 
Lake  Garda,  he  reported  to  the  Directory,  ' '  Our  outposts  are 
on  the  hills  of  Germany."  For  the  Austrian  ruler  was  the 
German  Emperor  in  those  days  and  Austria  was  the  head  of 
the  German  world. 

Meanwhile  Napoleon  brought  the  King  of  Naples  to  sue  for 
peace,  sent  an  expedition  to  seize  vast  stores  in  the  port  of 
Leghorn  belonging  to  English  merchants,  captured  Bologna, 
Ferrara  and  Urbino  in  the  Papal  States,  and  made  a  truce 
with  the  Pope ;  ran  off  to  Pavia,  where  he  converted  the  castle 
of  that  town  into  a  factory  for  the  making  of  2000  hospital 
beds,  and  to  Tortona,  where  he  assembled  all  manner  of  muni- 
tions for  his  campaign. 

As  he  was  dressing  one  morning  at  Tortona  he  broke  the 
glass  over  the  miniature  of  Josephine,  which  he  had  car- 
ried in  his  bosom  all  the  way  from  Paris.  His  yellow  counte- 
nance blanched  with  fear.  ' '  My  wife  is  ill ! "  he  cried  out  to 
Marmont;  *'or,"  the  jealous  Corsican  lover  darkly  added, 
"she  is  unfaithful."     He  sat  down  at  once  and  wrote: 

You  know  that  I  could  never  endure  to  see  you  in  love  with  any 
one,  still  less  endure  that  you  should  have  a  lover;  to  tear  out  his 
heart  and  to  see  him  would  be  one  and  the  same  thing,  and  then,  if 
I  could  raise  my  hand  against  your  sacred  person — No !  I  should 
never  dare,  but  I  should  at  once  abandon  a  life  in  which  the  most 
virtuous  being-  in  the  world  had  deceived  me.  ...  A  thousand  kisses 
on  your  eyes,  your  lips  ! 

Even  a  more  passionate  love  and  a  more  heroic  nature  than 


54  .  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  Creole  bride's  might  have  hesitated  to  obey  his  summons 
while  Napoleon's  headquarters  were  in  the  saddle.  Now  that 
he  held  Milan  and  had  a  roof  to  offer  her,  she  left  Paris  at 
his  bidding,  but  full  of  tearful  regret  for  the  festive  scenes  in 
which  she  had  been  the  central  figure.  Arriving  in  Milan  with 
Joseph  Bonaparte,  Colonel  Junot — and  her  dog  Fortune — 
there  was  another  two-day  honeymoon  in  the  Serbelloni  pal- 
ace, and  then  the  soldier  bridegroom  was  off  to  the  war 
again. 

Napoleon  was  now  in  a  desperate  situation.  Fifty  thousand 
Austrians  bore  down  apon  him,  where  he  stood  between  them 
and  their  big  garrison  in  Mantua,  and  he  was  surrounded  by 
hostile  Italian  states.  To  combat  the  foe  in  his  front  and  rear, 
he  had  hardly  more  than  40,000  men,  and  many  thousands  of 
these  were  besieging  the  fortress. 

"While  waiting  to  grapple  with  the  new  Austrian  army, 
under  the  command  of  Marshal  Wurmser,  he  induced 
Josephine  to  come  to  Brescia,  and  she  always  boasted  that  it 
was  her  presence  there  and  her  intuition  which  saved  her 
husband  from  falling  into  the  hands  of  the  stealthily  advancing 
enemy.  The  governor  at  Brescia,  with  a  show  of  cordial  hos- 
pitality, proposed  a  great  entertainment  in  her  honour,  but 
she  suspected  a  trap  and  at  her  urgent  suggestion.  Napoleon 
left  the  threatened  citj'  to  join  his  army,  while  she  went  to 
Salo,  on  Lake  Garda,  where,  however,  she  found  herself  under 
fire  from  a  flotilla.  Leaping  from  her  coach,  she  fled  afoot 
until  nearly  exhausted,  when  she  was  picked  up  in  a  peasant's 
two-wheeled  cart  and  conveyed  to  Castiglione,  where  she 
rushed  weeping  into  the  arms  of  her  husband,  who  in  a  spirit 
of  Corsican  vengeance  vowed,  "The  Austrians  shall  pay  dear 
for  those  tears ! ' ' 

Josephine  weeping  was  a  spectacle  Napoleon  never  could 
view  unmoved.  Often  it  was  to  leave  him  weak  and  irresolute. 
Now  it  set  the  youthful  lover  afire  with  an  ambition  to  win 
another  ^nctory,  to  console  and  dazzle  Josephine  with  a  new 
triumph. 

For  five  August  days,  he  did  not  take  off  his  boots  while 
he  smashed  right  and  left  at  two  Austrian  armies  until  he  had 


IN  THE  COCKPIT  OF  EUROPE        55 

beaten  and  divided  them.  In  the  course  of  that  running  fight 
which  bears  the  name  of  the  Battle  of  Castiglione,  he  rode  five 
horses  to  death  and  nearly  fell  a  captive  in  the  hands  of  the 
foe.     Nothing  but  his  audacity  saved  him. 

Twice  in  the  course  of  that  summer  he  was  in  imminent  peril 
of  being  taken  prisoner.  He  was  far  from  well  at  the  time. 
His  health  having  been  undermined  by  poverty  in  his  youth 
and  more  lately  by  exposure  in  the  earthworks  at  Toulon,  he 
was  still  suffering  from  blood  poisoning  which  he  contracted 
by  handling  an  infected  artillery  sponge  in  the  siege  of  that 
city.     Symptoms  of  tuberculosis  also  had  developed. 

He  hated  the  loathsome  drugs  in  the  pharmacopoeia  of 
that  day,  and  resisted  them  like  a  stubborn  child.  The 
only  thing  his  physician  could  do  to  relieve  his  frightful 
headaches  was  to  plunge  him  into  a  tub  or  barrel  of  hot 
water. 

As  he  had  taken  off  a  shoe,  preparatory  to  undressing  for 
such  a  bath  in  a  palace  near  Verona,  he  was  almost  captured, 
but  saved  himself  by  fleeing  through  the  garden  of  the  palace 
with  only  one  shoe  on.  That  experience  led  him  to  form  a 
body  of  Guides  for  his  personal  protection,  a  corps  which  even- 
tually developed  into  the  famous  Guard.  Bessieres  was  their 
leader,  and  every  man  among  them  must  have  seen  at  least 
ten  years  of  service. 

Another  day  neither  the  Guides  nor  flight  and  nothing  but 
his  own  audacity  could  save  him  from  falling  into  the  hands 
of  the  enemy.  The  Austrians  had  been  so  confused  by  the 
blow  they  received  in  a  battle  at  Lonato  that  4000  of  them 
wandered  about  the  country  in  a  body,  without  knowing  which 
way  to  go.  In  their  wandering  they  strayed  back  to  the  lost 
battlefield  of  the  day  before,  where  they  stumbled  upon  and 
surrounded  1200  French. 

The  officer  demanding  the  surrender  of  this  little  force  was 
blindfolded,  as  usual,  before  being  conducted  to  lieadquartei*s 
with  his  flag  of  truce.  There  Napoleon  had  quickly  mounted 
his  staff  and  drawn  his  Guides  around  him  in  an  imposing 
array.  When  the  bandage  was  removed,  the  eyes  of  the  Aus- 
trian opened  wide  with  amazement  as  he  found  himself  before 


56  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  General-in-chief  of  the  French,  who,  having  put  on  his 
most  terrifying  expression,  addressed  the  messenger  in  an 
indignant  tone : 

' '  What  means  this  insult  ?  Have  you  the  insolence  to  bring 
a  summons  of  surrender  to  me  in  the  middle  of  my  army? 
Say  to  those  who  sent  you  that  unless  they  lay  down  their 
arms  within  eight  minutes,  every  man  of  them  shall  be  shot." 
And  it  did  not  take  eight  minutes  for  the  4000  to  surrender 
to  the  1200 ! 

It  is  strange  that  it  should  have  been  among  the  very  hills 
where  Napoleon  won  the  victory  of  Castiglione,  that  Victor 
Emmanuel  and  Napoleon  III  fought  the  Battle  of  Solferino 
sixty-three  years  afterward  when  Austria  was  driven  out  of 
Lombardy  forever.  The  tall  tower  of  San  Martino  commemo- 
rates that  triumph,  and  on  its  inner  walls  are  inscribed,  in 
bronze,  the  names  of  no  less  than  650,000  Italians  who  took 
part  in  the  wars  for  the  liberation  of  Italy. 

Marshal  Wurmser,  defeated  at  Castiglione,  retired  to  the 
mountains  of  Tyrol  but  only  long  enough  to  reinforce  his 
shattered  army.  Again,  however,  he  divided  his  force,  which 
numbered  45,000,  and  in  September  he  moved  southward  in 
two  columns.  As  he  advanced,  Napoleon  went  to  meet  him 
and  the  clash  came  in  the  narrow  Tyrolean  passes.  At  the  end 
of  a  swift,  hot  campaign,  the  Austrians,  with  only  a  fourth 
of  their  original  strength,  made  their  way  down  into  Italy 
and  Wurmser  hastened  to  shut  himself  up  in  the  fortress  of 
Mantua. 

Another  army  of  50,000  was  gathered  by  Austria  the  next 
month  and  placed  under  the  command  of  General  Alvinzi. 
He,  too,  divided  his  forces,  but  the  little  band  of  French  was 
so  reduced  by  this  time  that  Napoleon  could  not  show  a  supe- 
riority of  numbers  at  any  point. 

With  his  small,  worn-out  army,  he  met  Alvinzi  in  Novem- 
ber at  Caldiero  where  the  mountains  of  Venetia  come  down 
to  the  plain.  It  is  a  beautiful  and  fruitful  land,  the  grape- 
vines stretching  in  garlands  from  tree  to  tree  in  the  orchards. 
This  affords  a  pretty  decorative  effect  for  tourist  eyes,  but  the 
Austrian  and  French  scouts  failed  to  enjoy  it  because  those 


IN  THE  COCKPIT  OF  EUROPE  57 

festoons  broke  the  view  and  baffled  them  in  their  work  of 
watching  the  movements  of  troops. 

Napoleon  lost  at  Caldiero  the  opening  fight  in  that  autumnal 
campaign  of  1796.  There,  for  the  first  time,  he  left  the  enemy 
on  a  field  of  battle.  Prudence  dictated  his  retirement  toward 
the  Adda.  But  courage  counselled  a  bolder  stroke.  The 
night  he  moved  in  silence  out  of  Verona,  the  crestfallen  troops 
felt  they  were  in  retreat  until  by  a  sudden  turn  they  found 
themselves  marching  along  the  River  Adige.  Their  com- 
mander had  determined  to  stake  everything  on  an  effort  to 
get  around  Alvinzi  and  cut  his  communications. 

And  he  chose  one  of  the  strangest  battlefields  in  the  geog- 
raphy of  warfare.  ^Miere  the  little  River  Alpone  flows  down 
to  join  the  Adige,  near  the  village  of  Ronco,  there  is  a  big 
marsh  lying  between  the  two  streams,  across  which  there  are 
only  two  diked  causeways,  and  an  army  cannot  move  except 
by  those  roads. 

"When  Napoleon  came  down  from  Verona,  he  put  that  marsh 
between  him  and  Alvinzi,  where  the  enemy  would  lose  the 
advantage  of  greater  numbers,  for  no  more  Austrians  than 
Frenchmen  could  advance  abreast  on  those  two  narrow  roads. 
It  was  a  clever  choice  of  ground,  and  the  only  means  of  avert- 
ing a  disaster. 

The  French  marched  out  of  Ronco  by  both  causeways,  but 
to  accomplish  their  main  purpose  and  get  in  the  rear  of  the 
Austrians  they  struggled  for  three  days  to  cross  the  fifty-foot 
bridge  over  the  Alpone.  At  one  end  of  the  famous  little 
bridge  to-day  sits  the  village  of  Arcole,  several  miles  from  a 
railroad  or  even  a  highroad.  From  the  other  end  stretches 
the  marsh,  which  is  now  drained  and  converted  into  well- 
tended  fields  as  level  as  the  prairie  farms  in  the  ]\Iississippi 
Valley.  Off  across  the  fields  rises  the  church  tower  of  Ronco, 
from  which  Napoleon  saw  the  enemy  holding  the  bridge,  while 
the  crags  of  the  bordering  mountains  on  the  north  stick  out 
as  sharp  as  the  barbs  on  a  wire  fence.  It  was  through  those 
rough  passes  that  the  Austrian  monarch  poured  the  blood  of 
Austria  and  Hungary  in  torrents  to  ransom  his  rich  Italian 
province  from  the  French. 


58  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

On  the  little  Arcole  bridge  the  two  great  nations  of  conti- 
nental Europe  fought  for  three  days  like  dogs  over  a  bone. 
It  is  as  rude  a  structure  as  that  which  arched  the  flood,  where, 
their  flag  to  April's  breeze  unfurled,  the  embattled  farmers 
stood  and  fired  the  shot  heard  round  the  world. 

By  Concord  bridge  a  people  passed  to  independence  and 
greatness.  By  Arcole  bridge  Italy,  too,  passed  to  independ- 
ence, but,  alas,  she  had  many  more  rivers  still  to  cross. 

High  banks  had  been  thrown  up  along  the  Alpone  to  con- 
fine its  waters  and  the  road  reaches  the  bridge  at  either  end 
by  a  steep  grade.  The  French  officers  rushed  to  the  head  of 
their  column  when  it  wavered  before  a  detachment  of  Aus- 
trian troops  who  defended  the  bridge.  They  hoped  to  repeat 
the  dash  at  Lodi.  But  their  show  of  bravery  was  lost  and 
Lannes  and  several  other  generals  were  wounded.  Augureau, 
seizing  a  flag,  leaped  upon  the  bridge  and  taunted  his  men 
as  they  bent  under  the  storm  of  the  enemy's  guns,  "Cowards, 
do  you  fear  death  too  much  ? ' '     Alas,  they  loved  life  too  well. 

Then  Napoleon  himself  took  the  lead,  while  Lannes,  for- 
getting his  wounds,  rose  from  his  hospital  cot  to  follow  him. 
The  little  General  sprang  upon  the  bridge,  where  he  was 
caught  in  a  furious  swirl  of  fighting  French  and  Croats. 
Brave  Muiron  threw  himself  before  him  to  cover  him  with 
his  body  and  was  struck  dead  at  the  feet  of  his  chief. 

The  bridge  could  not  be  taken  by  storm.  The  General-in- 
chief  was  whirled  back  with  his  men  and  pushed  off  the  steep 
grade  of  the  road  into  what  was  then  a  quagmire.  The  Little 
Corporal  literally  was  stuck  in  the  mud,  close  by  where  a 
stone  shaft,  a  piece  of  graveyard  art,  now  commemorates  his 
desperate  battle  for  the  bridge.  Marmont  and  Louis  Bona- 
parte were  foremost  among  those  who  ran  to  his  assistance 
and  rescued  him  from  the  enemy.  Lannes  was  wounded  again 
and  Napoleon  lamented  all  his  life  the  death  of  the  devoted 
Muiron. 

The  third  day  of  hard  fighting  about  Arcole  was  drawing 
to  a  close  with  both  armies  unnerved  and  sick  of  battle,  each 
only  waiting  for  the  other  to  quit  from  exhaustion.  Then 
Napoleon,  who  had  been  unable  to  win  with  blood  and  powder, 


IN  THE  COCKPIT  OF  EUROPE  59 

gained  the  victory  by  an  absurd  ruse.  Placing  trumpets  in 
the  hands  of  twenty-five  horsemen  he  sent  them  across  the 
river  farther  down  and  the}-  galloped  around  behind  Arcole 
in  the  waning  of  the  November  day. 

The  noise  of  the  trumpets  struck  terror  to  the  fainting 
hearts  of  the  Austrians.  At  the  thought  of  their  left  wing 
and  rear  being  ambushed  by  what  they  imagined  must  be  a 
column  of  cavalry,  their  last  drop  of  courage  left  them,  and 
soon  Alvinzi's  entire  army  was  in  full  retreat  on  the  moun- 
tains. Italy  had  been  saved  by  the  blare  of  twenty-five 
trumpets. 

"One  must  make  for  the  flying  foe,"  Napoleon  said,  "a 
bridge  of  gold  or  oppose  to  him  a  barrier  of  steel."  He 
gladly  gave  the  fleeing  Alvinzi  a  golden  bridge,  while  he  him- 
self flew  to  Milan  on  the  wings  of  love  and  burst  open  Jo- 
sephine's door  only  to  find  she  had  gone  on  a  merry  excursion 
to  Genoa. 

Sitting  down  in  the  lonely  palace  he  wrote  her  as  if  his 
heart  were  breaking.  From  a  series  of  chiding  and  despair- 
ing letters  written  by  him  in  that  period,  these  sentences  are 
taken : 

I  had  left  all  to  see  you,  to  press  you  to  my  heart — you  were  not 
here.  .  .  .  For  me,  to  love  you  alone,  to  make  you  happy,  to  do  noth- 
ing that  can  annoy  you,  that  is  the  lot  and  aim  of  my  life.  .  .  . 
When  I  ask  you  for  a  love  like  mine,  I  am  wrong;  why  expect  lace 
to  weigh  as  much  as  gold"?  ...  It  is  my  misfortune  that  nature  has 
denied  me  qualities  that  might  fascinate  you.  ...  I  open  my  letter 
to  send  you  a  kiss.    Ah,  Josephine,  Josephine! 


CHAPTER  VIII 

CONQUERING  AUSTRIA 

1797     AGE  27 

WHEN  Napoleon  had  driven  the  Austrians  off  the 
Lombardy  plain  four  times,  another  army  of 
40,000  white  coats,  under  General  Alvinzi,  started 
down  the  defiles  of  the  Tyrol  in  the  depth  of  the  winter  of 
1796-7. 

Napoleon  was  in  doubt  where  to  find  and  meet  the  main 
column  of  the  enemy  until  late  of  a  January  night  when  he 
divined  that  Alvinzi 's  own  command  was  headed  straight  for 
Verona  along  the  banks  of  the  Adige.  Ordering  reinforce- 
ments to  follow  him  at  full  speed  he  raced  to  Eivoli,  seventeen 
miles  north,  where  10,000  French  were  recoiling  in  the  pres- 
ence of  28,000  Austrians.  Fairly  flying  on  his  horse  through 
a  cold,  white  night  he  arrived  at  the  French  position  at  four 
o'clock  in  the  morning  and  with  his  cheering  assurance  that 
13,000  men  were  coming  to  the  support  of  the  sorely  beset 
10,000,  he  was  just  in  time  to  avert  a  retreat. 

The  battlefield  of  Kivoli  is  a  classic  in  military  topography. 
It  is  a  broad,  fairly  level  plateau,  with  mountains  rising  be- 
fore and  behind  it;  the  Adige  rushes  along  one  side,  and  a 
range  of  hills  on  the  west  runs  down  to  Lake  Garda,  six  miles 
away. 

On  that  drill  ground  Napoleon  found  the  French  en- 
camped. Off  toward  Monte  Baldo,  on  whose  snows  the  moon 
glistened,  he  saw  the  wide-flung  line  of  camp  fires  of  the  sleep- 
ing Austrians.  ''The  air  was  aflame  with  them,"  he  said. 
But  the  enemy  to  gain  a  footing  on  the  plateau  must  climb 
up  steep,  crooked  and  icy  roads,  and  those  zigzag  paths  were 
to  determine  the  result  of  the  battle. 

Without  waiting  for  the  Austrians  to  open  the  attack  or  for 

60 


CONQUERING  AUSTRIA  61 

the  French  reinforcements  to  arrive,  Napoleon  at  once  took 
the  aggressive.  In  the  earlier  hours  that  followed  the  sun- 
rise, the  Austrians  drove  in  their  foes  at  every  point  of  con- 
tact and  threatened  to  catch  them  in  the  rear  as  well  as  to 
climb  up  on  the  plateau  and  break  through  their  front. 

Napoleon  sat  on  his  horse  as  calmly  as  at  a  review  while 
his  lines  wavered  and  with  anxious  eyes  his  generals  watched 
his  face.  He  was  only  waiting  for  the  Austrians  in  front  to 
climb  up  and  show  their  white  coats  above  the  edge  of  the 
plateau,  for  his  artillery  to  catch  them  on  either  side  while 
his  infantry  dashed  at  the  head  of  their  column  and  tumbled 
them  down  the  slope.  As  for  the  white  coats  in  his  rear 
they,  too,  were  just  where  he  w^anted  them,  ready  to  be  caught 
in  their  own  rear  by  the  French  reinforcements  coming  up 
from  Verona. 

When  he  heard  the  gloating  shouts  of  the  Austrians  behind 
him,  where  they  fondly  believed  they  had  him  and  his  army 
enclosed  within  a  wall  of  steel,  he  chuckled  softly,  "Now  we 
have  them!"  Every  man  of  that  flanking  column  was  cap- 
tured, while  the  artillery  smashed  and  the  cavalry  dashed  to 
pieces  the  columns  that  scrambled  up  the  northern  steeps  of 
the  heights  of  Rivoli. 

Alvinzi  took  flight  from  the  scene  with  much  less  than  half 
the  men  he  had  led  down  from  Trent.  Napoleon,  in  less 
than  ten  months,  had  vanquished  the  fifth  army  which  Aus- 
tria had  sent  against  him. 

Like  a  circus  showing  in  one-day  towns,  the  main  body  of 
the  French  broke  camp  as  soon  as  the  battle  was  won.  Not 
long  after  midnight  they  were  on  the  march  southward,  to 
prevent  the  Austrian  division,  which  had  moved  down  the 
other  side  of  Lake  Garda,  from  relieving  JNIantua.  The  re- 
inforcements at  Rivoli  had  marched  fourteen  miles  the  night 
before  the  battle.  After  fighting  all  day  they  were  now  on 
a  thirty-mile  march  toward  ]\Iantua,  most  of  them  without 
lying  down.  They  arrived  on  the  new  field  of  conflict  in 
time  not  only  to  avert  the  junction  of  the  marching  Austrians 
with  the  Mantuan  garrison,  but  to  catch  all  of  the  9000  of 
them  in  a  net. 


62  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Mantua  was  tottering  to  its  fall.  The  men  hemmed  within 
its  walls  could  no  longer  receive  even  their  half  rations  of 
salted  horse  meat.  Disease  as  well  as  famine  threatened  their 
extermination.  One  night  in  early  February,  Wurmser  sent 
an  officer  to  the  tent  of  Gen,  Seurrier,  the  commander  of  the 
besieging  force,  to  find  out  what  kind  of  bargain  could  be 
made.  The  messenger  boasted,  as  usual,  of  the  strength  and 
endurance  left  in  the  garrison,  and  of  its  rich  stores,  sufficient 
bountifully  to  supply  the  men  for  three  months  more. 

He  had  no  thought  that  the  young  French  officer  who, 
wrapped  in  his  cloak,  was  sitting  in  a  dark  corner  of  the  tent, 
scribbling  on  a  sheet  of  paper,  was  the  famous  General-in- 
chief ,  At  last  the  little  man  in  the  cloak  ceased  his  scribbling 
and,  walking  to  the  table,  threw  the  paper  upon  it. 

"There,"  said  Napoleon,  "are  the  conditions  which  I  will 
grant.  If  your  marshal  had  provisions  only  for  three  weeks 
and  talked  of  surrender  he  would  deserve  my  contempt.  I 
know  the  extremities  to  which  he  is  reduced,  and  I  respect 
his  valour,  his  misfortune,  and  his  age.  Whether  he  sur- 
renders to-morrow,  in  a  month,  or  in  three  months,  he  shall 
have  neither  better  nor  harder  conditions.  He  may  stay  as 
long  as  his  sense  of  honour  prompts  him  to  hold  out." 

When  the  Austrian  army  hobbled  out  of  the  Verona  gate  of 
Mantua  the  next  morning,  expecting  to  see  their  venerable 
commander  humbled  before  his  youthful  conqueror.  Napo- 
leon had  left  the  scene,  and  the  aged  Wurmser  was  spared 
that  hmniliation.  The  30,000  French  now  had  40,000  cap- 
tives to  their  credit  within  less  than  a  month. 

When  not  an  Austrian  remained  in  arms  on  Italian  soil, 
Napoleon  at  last  received  reinforcements  from  the  Directory 
and  the  spring  found  him  with  80,000  men  under  his  com- 
mand. Taking  half  of  that  force  with  him,  he  set  out  in 
March  on  the  road  to  Vienna,  where,  by  threatening  the  Aus- 
trian capital,  he  hoped  to  bring  the  Emperor  to  terms  of 
peace.  But  Austria,  victorious  against  the  Army  of  the 
Ehine,  if  so  often  overwhelmed  by  the  Army  of  Italy,  called 
the  young,  royal  commander,  the  Archduke  Charles,  from  his 
field  of  victory  in  the  west  to  try  his  lance  with  the  young 


The  Little  Cokpoiial   at  the   HiuiKiE  of   Lodi 


\\  ITH    JOSKI-HINE    AT    A    FeTL    1.\     MlLAN 


i\ 


CONQUERING  AUSTRIA  63 

republican  commander  and  save  the  capital  of  the  Haps- 
burgs.  Age  had  not  proved  to  be  a  match  for  youth.  Beau- 
lieu  was  seventy-one  and  Wurmser  seventy-nine.  But  Charles 
was  even  younger  than  Napoleon,  only  twenty-five,  and  the 
new  campaign  was  to  be  a  competition  between  generals  who 
had  no  more  than  entered  manhood. 

It  is  530  miles,  as  the  railroad  runs,  from  Verona  to  Vienna. 
But  there  were  no  Vienna  expresses,  no  trains  de  luxe  for 
Napoleon  through  the  wildly  picturesque  passages  of  the 
Eastern  Alps.  Part  of  the  way  over  which  he  led  his  troops, 
with  their  cannon  and  supplies,  was  no  more  than  a  mule 
track,  where  a  cart  never  had  been.  They  climbed  and 
stumbled  and  pulled  and  hauled  up  the  sleety  mountain  sides. 
They  laboured  over  the  heights  through  three  feet  of  snow, 
where  there  was  not  a  guiding  footprint  before  them.  They 
waded  and  leaped  the  torrents  in  the  valleys. 

The  French  came  upon  the  Austrians  in  the  Tyrol,  but  the 
Archduke  Charles,  longing  for  reinforcements,  refused  to 
make  a  stand,  and  fell  back  from  height  to  height.  Napo- 
leon giving  him  no  resting  time.  At  Tarvis,  Charles  turned 
in  earnest  for  the  iirst  time  and  faced  his  relentless  pur- 
suer. 

Tarvis  sits  on  the  summit  of  the  Noric  Alps  at  the  head  of 
a  valley  where  a  bronze  soldier  stands  to-day  on  the  brow  of 
a  cliff,  a  feather  in  his  Austrian  hat  and  a  gun  in  his  hand. 
This  statue  does  not  commemorate  an  Austrian  victory  in 
the  campaign  of  1797,  however,  but  in  another  and  later 
struggle  with  France  twelve  years  afterward.  For  Tar\is, 
in  spite  of  its  commanding  position,  could  not  check  Napo- 
leon's advance.  The  pass  here  is  at  its  deepest  and  narrow- 
est measure,  with  barely  room  for  the  swift  flowing,  silvery 
Kanal  and  the  highroad  beside  it. 

Through  all  the  beautiful  valley  above  Tarvis,  the  people 
have  taken  flight  from  savage  man  to  savage  nature  on  the 
mountain  sides  and  even  on  the  mountain  tops,  where  on 
seemingly  inaccessible  crags  of  the  jagged  Alpine  heights  they 
have  pitched  their  towns.  An  army  must  have  to  crowd 
closely  together  to  keep  from  rubbing  against  the  stony  walls 


64  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

that  shut  in  the  path.     And  at  every  angle  there  is  an  old 
castle  to  threaten  the  invader  of  those  wild  fastnesses. 

The  retreating  Austrians  were  speedily  melting  away  un- 
der the  hot  onslaughts  of  Napoleon  and  he  found  the  road 
strewn  with  their  sick  and  wounded,  whom  they  abandoned 
in  their  flight  to  the  mercies  of  the  elements  and  the  foe.  De- 
scending into  the  valley  of  the  Drave,  he  sent  on  ahead  from 
Klagenfurt  to  the  Archduke  an  appeal  for  peace,  saying : 

Brave  soldiers  make  war  and  desire  peace.  Has  not  this  one  lasted 
six  years?  Have  we  not  killed  enough  men  and  inflicted  enough 
evils  on  sorrowing  humanity? 

Even  a  prince  of  the  oldest  royal  house  of  Europe  could 
not  take  exception  to  the  lofty  tone  of  that  communication 
from  the  Corsican  republican.  Charles  returned  a  courte- 
ous reply  and  referred  the  letter  to  his  brother,  the  Emperor, 
who,  himself,  w^as  already  fleeing  from  the  oncoming  foe. 
The  imperial  family  abandoned  their  palaces  in  Vienna  and 
abandoned  their  capital  in  terror  at  the  approach  of  the  re- 
publican hosts.  Among  the  fugitives,  running  away  from 
Napoleon,  the  ogre  of  every  royal  house,  was  a  six-year-old 
princess,  the  Archduchess  I\Iarie  Louise ! 

After  more  Austrian  defeats  and  when  the  French  were  at 
Leoben,  only  117  miles  from  Vienna,  as  the  railroad  now 
runs,  and  more  than  400  miles  from  the  starting  point  of 
their  campaign  just  four  weeks  before,  Austria  cried  enough 
and  laid  down  her  arms. 

Her  envoys  came  to  Leoben,  in  its  pretty  vale,  and  choos- 
ing a  garden  as  neutral  ground,  they  met  the  conqueror  there 
in  a  summer  house.  As  they  started  to  w^rite  in  the  pre- 
amble of  the  armistice  the  statement  that  the  Emperor  of 
Germany  recognised  the  French  Republic,  Napoleon  com- 
manded, * '  Strike  that  out ;  the  Republic  is  like  the  sun ;  none 
but  the  blind  can  fail  to  recognise  it." 


CHAPTER  IX 

NATIONS  AT  THE  FEET  OF  A  YOUTH 

1796-1797      AGE  26-27 

MILAN  was  Napoleon's  first  capital,  his  training  school 
in  the  trade  of  empire.  From  the  fields  of  his  mili- 
tary victories,  where  he  vanquished  four  Austrian 
generals  and  five  Austrian  armies,  winning  his  way  in  a  year 
twice  across  the  Alps  and  from  the  shores  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean to  the  valley  of  the  Danube,  he  dashed  into  the  city 
between  battles  to  negotiate  treaties  and  create  states. 

Across  the  square  from  the  famous  cathedral  stand  the 
walls  of  the  first  royal  palace  in  which  he  ever  slept.  It  is 
a  big,  sprawling,  dreary  pile  which  cumbers  an  acre  or  so  of 
earth  and  which  in  silent  gloom  remains  untenanted  now- 
adays except  for  a  rare  visit  from  the  King  of  Italy  or  some 
member  of  the  reigning  family. 

When  Napoleon  first  entered  ]Milan  in  his  brand-new  glory 
after  the  dash  across  the  bridge  of  Lodi  in  May,  1796,  he 
strode  into  this  palace  as  the  Austrian  Archduke  fled  out 
the  back  door.  Climbing  into  the  viceregal  bed  of  a  Haps- 
burg  prince,  he  who  had  never  known  a  roof  of  his  own  must 
have  proudly  contrasted  his  new  lodgings  with  his  $2  a  month 
den  at  Mile.  Bou's  in  Valence  only  four  years  before. 

The  people,  however,  did  not  think  this  abiding  place  of  the 
Visconti,  the  Sforzas  and  the  Spanish  and  Austrian  viceroys, 
this  home  of  despotism  for  600  years,  was  a  suitable  dwelling 
for  their  republican  liberator,  the  young  scourge  of  tyrants. 
When  he  came  again  a  patriotic  aristocrat  invited  him  to  ac- 
cept his  house  and  he  went  to  live  in  the  Serbelloni  palace — 
on  the  Corso  Venezia,  a  few  squares  behind  the  cathedral. 

65 


66  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  Serbelloni  is  far  more  beautiful  than  the  royal  palace 
and  probably  the  most  beautiful  of  all  the  palaces  of  Milan. 
The  passerby  on  the  street  car  may  see  only  its  severe  ex- 
terior, with  the  marble  tablet  commemorating  Napoleon's 
tenancy,  and  might  not  suspect  its  inner  beauties,  its  great 
columns  and  noble  courtyard,  its  royal  halls  adorned  by  the 
brushes  of  Titian,  Velasquez,  Salvator  Rosa  and  other  masters. 

There  in  the  Serbelloni,  Josephine  was  installed  by  Na- 
poleon when  she  came  on  from  Paris  and  it  was  their  honey- 
moon nest.  There  they  served  their  apprenticeship  in  the 
art  of  reigning,  requiring  neither  a  royal  palace  nor  a  royal 
crown  for  their  rehearsal. 

Napoleon,  indeed,  hardly  needed  to  study  the  part.  Na- 
ture seems  to  have  cast  him  for  it.  In  the  obscurity  and 
poverty  of  his  youth  there  was  something  imperial  in  his  bear- 
ing and  temper,  something  that  marked  him  apart  and  held 
him  aloof  from  his  fellows.  The  world  only  called  him  queer 
then,  but  the  instant  he  gained  power  it  acclaimed  him  great. 

The  transition  came  in  a  day.  Veteran  generals  of  the 
Army  of  Italy  were  transformed  at  once  from  his  critics  into 
his  courtiers  and  he  had  no  more  than  sat  down  in  Milan 
than  a  court  spontaneously  formed  around  him.  "While  the 
populace  stood  by  the  hour  on  the  Corso  Venezia  waiting  to 
catch  a  glimpse  of  him  as  he  entered  or  left  the  palace,  his 
officers  and  the  members  of  the  Milanese  aristocracy  sat  in 
the  grand  drawing  room  with  their  eyes  on  the  big  folding 
doors,  watching  for  them  to  swing  wide  and  for  him  to  appear 
before  them.  The  moment  they  saw  him,  every  one  of  them, 
men  and  women  alike,  French  republicans  equally  with 
Italian  aristocrats,  sprang  to  their  feet  and  bowed  in  silent 
homage  beneath  the  eagle-like  glance  of  his  deep-set  grey  eyes. 

As  yet  his  eyes  were  almost  the  only  feature  that  men  re- 
marked in  the  personal  presence  of  this  little,  long-haired, 
pinched  face  General-in-chief.  His  lean,  frail,  girlish  figure 
might  have  been  that  of  a  poet  starving  for  a  publisher.  His 
stooping,  almost  round  shoulders  and  pallid  countenance  sug- 
gested the  study  room  of  a  scholar  rather  than  the  camp  of  a 
conqueror. 


NATIONS  AT  THE  FEET  OF  A  YOUTH    67 

Success  and  glory  had  yet  found  no  reflection  in  his  visage 
and  it  was  still  as  sorrowful  as  when  it  bent  over  the  plate  of 
a  six-sou  dinner  in  a  cheap  restaurant  of  Paris  or  in  suicidal 
meditation  gazed  longingly  upon  the  Rhone  at  Valence.  The 
one  soldierly  thing  about  his  appearance  was  his  uniform  and 
that  was  as  plain  as  the  army  regulations  permitted. 

The  artist  Gros  has  described,  but  should  have  painted,  a 
pretty  scene  at  the  Serbelloni  when  he  came  from  Paris  to 
paint  his  celebrated  picture  of  Napoleon  on  the  bridge  of 
Arcole.  Never  finding  his  subject  at  rest  long  enough  to  en- 
able him  to  start  the  picture,  the  only  sittings  he  obtained 
were  directly  after  breakfast  when,  for  his  benefit,  Josephine 
sometimes  obligingly  held  the  Little  Corporal  on  her  knee. 

Out  on  the  old  Como  road,  only  a  few  miles  from  IMilan, 
stands  another  monument  of  Napoleon's  Italian  reign  in  the 
melancholy  form  of  a  lunatic  asylum.  This  bedlam  once  was 
the  lovely  villa  of  Montebello,  and  the  walls  that  now  echo 
back  the  chatter  of  a  colony  of  poor,  demented  creatures  re- 
sounded in  other  days  with  the  mirth  of  youth  rejoicing  in 
the  first  harvest  of  its  ambition. 

In  his  second  and  last  summer  in  Italy,  after  the  armistice 
with  Austria,  Napoleon  left  the  heat  of  the  cit}',  for  IMilan 
is  one  of  the  hottest  places  in  Italy,  and  took  up  his  residence 
at  this  villa,  which  time  has  changed  beyond  recognition.  It 
was  then  a  great  country  palace,  sitting  far  back  from  the 
highroad  in  a  large  park,  with  cool,  shady  avenues,  pretty 
fountains,  ingenious  grottoes,  and  all  the  exquisite  loveliness 
of  an  Italian  retreat.  Two  flights  of  steps  led  up  to  the  broad, 
high  terrace  that  ran  along  the  front  and  sides  of  the  villa 
from  which  the  Alps  could  be  seen  on  the  one  hand  and  the 
lace-like  turrets  of  the  Milan  cathedral  on  the  other. 

In  that  sylvan  refuge  the  young  arbiter  of  nations  gath- 
ered about  him  the  families  of  his  military  and  civil  officers, 
and  thither  the  envoys  of  suppliant  states  followed  him. 
There,  too,  with  a  Corsican  loyalty  to  the  ties  of  blood,  he 
assembled  most  of  his  family  and  was  reunited  with  them  for 
the  first  time  since  the  flight  of  the  Bonapartes  from  Corsica. 

A  picturesque  guard  of  300  Polish  soldiers  was  stationed 


68  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in  the  park  and  the  band  of  the  Guides  played  for  dinner, 
where  like  a  Bourbon  monarch,  apart  from  his  courtiers,  Na- 
poleon ate,  while  a  mob  of  privileged  persons  stood  and 
watched  the  eagle  feed,  their  awed  gaze  disconcerting  him 
no  more  than  if  he  had  been  born  and  bred  at  Versailles. 

As  the  company  sipped  its  after-dinner  coffee  on  the  ter- 
race, Mme.  Leopold  Berthier,  wife  of  the  younger  brother  of 
the  chief  of  staff,  sang  in  the  drawing  room,  or  there  floated 
out  the  deeper-toned  melody  of  General  Kilmaine,  the  brave 
Dublin  man  and  veteran  of  the  American  Revolution,  who 
delighted  in  singing  the  airs  of  Erin,  Another  man  of  Irish 
blood  but  of  French  birth,  General  Clarke,  was  the  favourite 
story  teller  of  the  terrace. 

But  when  the  circle  had  gone  indoors  and  left  the  outer 
air  to  the  fireflies.  Napoleon  himself  sometimes  practised  his 
dramatic  gifts.  As  he  enacted  a  Corsican  ghost  story,  with 
only  a  candle  or  two  to  light  up  his  face,  the  women  rewarded 
his  efforts  with  screams  of  horror. 

The  court  of  Montebello  were  a  merry  lot,  hardly  more  than 
boys  and  girls  and  giddy  with  their  sudden  rise  from  poverty 
and  obscurity.  If  they  could  have  foretold  the  strange  for- 
tunes that  awaited  them,  if  they  had  prophetically  anticipated 
the  future  by  ten  years  and  hailed  one  another  as  emperor  and 
empress,  kings  and  queens,  princes  and  princesses,  dukes  and 
duchesses,  counts  and  countesses  they  would  have  seemed  more 
mad  than  their  present  unfortunate  successors,  the  insane  in- 
mates of  Montebello. 

Napoleon  had  taken  care  to  share  his  prosperity  with  his 
family  at  each  upward  step  in  his  swiftly  changing  fortunes. 
Nearly  all  the  $10,000  that  the  Directory  voted  him  for  put- 
ting down  the  revolt  in  the  streets  of  Paris  went  at  once  to 
his  impoverished  mother,  who  had  seen  with  dismay  her 
daughters  growing  up  wild  and  neglected  in  patched  shoes 
and  clothes,  robbing  orchards  like  tomboys  and  flirting  with 
gallant  Frenchmen  in  the  streets  of  Marseilles, 

With  their  changing  lot  in  life  the  Bonapartes  changed 
their  names,  dropping  their  Corsican  nomenclature  for  more 
French-sounding  prenomen.     The  mother,  Letizia,  was  Latin- 


NATIONS  AT  THE  FEET  OF  A  YOUTH    69 

ized  into  Letitia,  Guisseppi  became  Joseph;  Luciano  became 
Lucien,  although  for  a  while  he  adopted  the  name  of  Brutus; 
Luigi  was  made  over  into  Louis. 

In  her  devoutness  Letitia  had  christened  all  the  girls  for 
the  Virgin,  but  now  Maria  Annunziata  was  transformed  into 
Caroline,  Maria  Anna  into  Elisa,  and  Maria  Faoletta  into 
Pauline.  Napoleon  disliked  his  own  name  as  too  foreign  in 
France  but  fame  overtook  it  and  glorified  it  before  he  could 
change  it.  He  dropped  the  u  from  Buonaparte,  however, 
when  he  took  command  of  the  Army  of  Italy,  and  Gallicized 
the  pronunciation  by  silencing  the  final  e. 

Napoleon  at  twenty-six  and  twenty-seven  not  only  found 
himself  with  a  court,  but  in  the  full  exercise  of  nearly  all  the 
powers  of  an  absolute  sovereign.  Under  his  multitude  of 
cares,  he  sent  for  Bourrienne,  his  old  schoolmate  of  Brienne 
and  companion  of  his  poverty  in  Paris.  The  new  secretary 
found  his  desk  buried  in  neglected  letters,  but  Napoleon  told 
him  to  open  only  those  that  came  by  special  couriers  and  pitch 
all  the  rest  in  a  basket  for  three  weeks.  It  was  discovered  then 
that  time  had  answered  four-fifths  of  them,  and  the  inventor 
of  this  labour-saving  device  laughed  heartily  over  its  success. 

A  man  must  be  more  than  warrior  to  win  the  highest  fame. 
The  sword  was  but  a  single  tool  in  the  kit  of  Alexander  and 
Csesar,  Charlemagne  and  Napoleon. 

The  combination  is  always  and  everywhere  irresistible. 
Happily  the  American  Revolution  found  it  in  Washington, 
and  happily  the  American  Civil  War  did  not  find  it  in  any 
of  its  generals. 

As  soon  as  Napoleon  arrived  in  Italy  he  proceeded  to  act 
as  soldier,  diplomat  and  law  giver.  He  found  nearly  20,- 
000,000  Italians  separated  into  a  dozen  nationalities,  and  half 
of  them  under  alien  conquerors.  Patriotism  was  only  a 
dream,  and  the  dreamers  were  in  prison  or  exile.  Napoleon 
aroused  this  long  repressed  passion,  and  with  a  large  and 
generous  vision,  disregarding  and  def^'ing  his  government,  he 
laid  the  corner  stone  of  united  Italy.  In  one  short,  crowded 
year  the  peninsula  was  revolutionised  and  republicanised 
from  the  summit  of  the  Alps  to  the  summit  of  the  Apennines 


70  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

with  only  the  kingdom  of  Sardinia  and  the  duchy  of  Parma 
standing  as  the  spared  monuments  of  the  old  order  of  things. 

Everywhere  Napoleon  was  the  Republic.  He  convoked 
the  Italians  in  a  great  assembly  for  the  first  time.  He 
brought  the  best  minds  and  spirits  of  Italy  into  the  govern- 
ment, recalling  many  exiles  to  share  in  the  upbuilding  of  a 
nation,  the  Cisalpine  Republic.  But  he  himself  was  the  law- 
giver, and  constitutions  were  drafted  under  his  eyes. 

In  all  his  pulling  down  of  thrones,  there  was  one  that  the 
young  conqueror  shrank  from  laying  hands  on,  the  venerable 
throne  of  Peter.  He  invaded  and  dismembered  the  Papal 
States,  but,  although  continually  urged  by  the  Directors  to 
seize  Rome,  he  spared  the  eternal  city  and  scrupulously  re- 
frained from  stepping  foot  in  it. 

No  such  compunction  as  the  Holy  See  inspired  in  him,  re- 
strained him  in  dealing  with  Venice,  which,  notwithstand- 
ing the  virtuous  outcry  of  many  historians,  was  perhaps  the 
least  deserving  state  in  all  Italy.  The  Venetian  territory  lay 
between  the  French  and  the  Austrian  frontier,  and  its  rulers 
did  not  sufficiently  conceal  their  hostility  to  France. 

At  last,  while  Napoleon  was  away  on  his  campaign  in  Aus- 
tria, a  bloody  massacre  of  the  French,  which  did  not  spare 
even  the  sick  in  the  hospitals  of  Verona,  took  place  on  Vene- 
tian territory,  and  the  fate  of  Venice  was  sealed.  "I  will 
be  an  Attila  to  you,"  he  stormed  at  the  Doge;  "the  lion  of 
St.  Mark  must  bite  the  dust."  Thus  a  despotism  of  a  thou- 
sand years  fell  with  as  sudden  a  crash  as  we  have  seen  its 
Campanile  fall  in  our  day. 

As  Napoleon  stirred  the  emotions  of  the  Italians  with  hopes 
of  national  independence,  he  fired  his  army  of  French  re- 
publicans with  the  zeal  of  liberators  and  made  them  "play 
and  laugh  with  death,"  as  he  said,  while  they  marched  and 
battled  for  the  liberation  of  men.  It  is  true  he  no  longer 
shared  his  soldiers'  simple  faith  in  the  Republic.  He  had 
been  behind  the  scenes  in  Paris  and  the  illusions  of  his  youth 
were  gone.  The  nightmare  of  the  Reign  of  Terror  had  re- 
placed the  beautiful  dreams  of  his  barrack  days  and  a  gen- 
erous faith  in  humanity  had  withered  into  a  bitter  cynicism. 


NATIONS  AT  THE  FEET  OF  A  YOUTH    71 

Already  he  had  made  the  fatal  mistake  of  his  career — he 
had  mistaken  for  mankind  the  plotting  politicians  of  the 
French  capital.  "What  an  idea,"  he  exclaimed,  "a  republic 
of  30,000,000  men!  Give  the  French  people  a  rattle  and 
they  are  satisfied."  He  held  no  higher  opinions  of  the 
Italians:  "Good  God!  There  are  18,000,000  people  in  Italy 
and  with  difficulty  I  have  found  only  two  men." 

If,  however,  his  republicanism  was  now  only  a  pretence, 
he  was  still  as  true  as  any  man  in  the  ranks  to  what  he  re- 
garded as  the  great,  original  purpose  of  the  Revolution.  He 
had  no  use  for  the  Bourbons.  He  was  intensely  loyal  to  the 
new  France.  Other  commanders  of  the  armies  of  the  Re- 
public had  sold  out.     But  his  sword  was  without  price. 

Naples  and  Venice,  Austria  and  the  Bourbons  offered  him 
rich  bribes  in  cash  and  honours.  Money  never  is  the  tempter 
of  the  Alexanders  and  the  Cssars,  the  Charlemagnes  and  the 
Napoleons.  It  cannot  buy  what  they  want.  Great  ambitions 
can  have  no  alloy  of  avarice.  The  eagle  cannot  soar  with 
bags  of  gold  tied  to  its  feet. 

Napoleon  appears  to  have  kept  his  hands  clean  while  the 
foremost  savants  of  France  were  joying  in  the  robbery  of 
the  galleries,  and  her  naturalists  ravaged  the  gardens  and 
museums  of  Italy.  The  Romans  never  exulted  more  proudly 
or  loudly  at  the  triumph  of  a  returning  conqueror  in  his 
chariot  with  his  long  procession  of  human  spoils  than  the 
Parisians  as  they  watched  the  parade  of  carts  piled  high  with 
the  looted  art  of  Italy  on  its  way  to  the  Louvre. 

The  coming  of  Raphael's  Transfiguration,  of  the  Apollo 
Belvidere,  of  the  Capitoline  Gladiator,  of  the  Laocoou,  of  the 
bronze  horses  of  Venice  and  the  winged  lion  of  St.  ]Mark,  of 
the  immortal  creations  of  Titian,  Correggio  and  the  rest  of  the 
old  masters  symbolised  to  the  popular  imagination  better 
than  any  other  trophies  the  flattering  thought  that  Paris  was 
mistress  of  the  world  and  that  France  had  succeeded  to  the 
grandeur  that  was  Rome. 

Napoleon's  final  achievement  in  Italy  was  the  negotiation 
of  a  treaty  of  peace  with  Austria,  a  power  that  had  relent- 
lessly fought  the  Republic  from  its  birth.     In  this  w^ork  he 


72  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

confidently  matched  himself  alone  against  Count  Cobentzl, 
one  of  the  most  renowned  diplomats  of  Europe,  supported 
by  a  distinguished  staff  of  Austrian  experts. 

Going  with  Josephine  into  the  Friuli  above  Venice,  in  Octo- 
ber 1797,  they  settled  down  at  Passeriano,  in  the  country  villa 
of  the  overthrown  Doge  of  Venice,  while  the  Austrian  nego- 
tiators established  themselves  in  the  neighbouring  town  of 
Udine.  The  veteran  and  eminent  diplomat  met  the  young 
soldier  with  an  easy  air  of  familiar  badinage,  but  Napoleon 
with  one  look  established  their  relations  on  a  different  basis. 
Then  the  game  began. 

History  has  a  startling  picture  of  him  seizing  from  a  table 
in  Count  Cobentzl 's  quarters  a  rare  and  costly  vase  which 
Catherine  of  Eussia  had  given  to  the  Count,  and  lifting  it 
above  his  face  convulsed  with  rage  dashing  it  in  a  hundred 
pieces  on  the  floor  as  he  roared:  "See!  So  will  I  smash 
your  monarchy  before  another  month  has  passed."  It  is 
true  that  after  a  wild  scene  of  some  kind,  he  rushed  out  of 
the  room,  loudly  shouting  to  his  staff  to  notify  the  Archduke 
Charles  that  hostilities  would  be  reopened  in  twenty-four 
hours.  But  the  Austrians  hurried  after  him  and  laid  down 
their  hand  to  the  winner  in  the  great  poker  game  which  both 
sides  had  been  plajdng. 

As  a  consolation  for  her  loss  of  Belgium  and  Lombardy, 
Austria  accepted  Venice  and  most  of  Venetia,  including  the 
Trentino  and  the  Dalmatian  coast,  which  never  had  belonged 
to  her  and  which  form  the  "Italia  irridenta,"  the  unre- 
deemed Italy  for  which  Italians  have  sighed  so  long.  The 
instrument  was  signed  at  Passeriano,  but  it  was  christened 
the  Treaty  of  Campo  Formio  for  a  little  village  on  the  neu- 
tral ground  lying  between  the  houses  of  the  two  parties  to 
the  compact. 

The  people  of  France  welcomed  the  end  of  the  more  than 
five  years'  war  with  Austria,  and  the  Peace  of  Campo 
Formio  was  hailed  as  the  crowning  victory  of  the  Army  of 
Italy,  whose  flag  bore  the  boast  of  150,000  prisoners  and  610 
pieces  of  artillery  captured  in  eighteen  pitched  battles  and 
in  three  times  as  many  minor  engagements. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  DESCENT  UPON  EGYPT 

1797-1798     AGE  28 

RETURNING  to  Paris  after  an  absence  of  twenty 
months,  Napoleon  found  himself  the  hero  of  a  city 
whose  streets  in  days  not  long  before  he  had  tramped 
hungry  and  out  at  the  elbows.  Only  thirteen  years  had 
passed  since  he  first  shyly  peeped  at  the  great  capital 
from  behind  the  hooded  and  belted  robe  of  the  Minim  friar 
of  Brienne  who  had  led  him  to  the  Ecole  Militaire.  It  was 
only  five  years  since  he  had  come  as  a  cashiered  lieutenant 
to  beg  back  his  place  in  the  army,  and  it  was  only  two  since 
the  populace  had  fled  from  him  as  the  unknown  "man  on 
horseback."  Now  his  name  was  on  the  myriad  lips  of  the 
city  as  they  acclaimed  him  the  deliverer  of  France  and  the 
pacifier  of  Europe,  and  his  modest  honeymoon  street  was  re- 
christened  the  Rue  de  la  Victoire. 

The  applause  of  Paris  disturbed  him  more  than  her  neglect 
in  the  days  of  his  poverty  and  obscurity.  *'Bah!"  he  said. 
"These  people  would  crowd  to  see  me  just  as  hard  if  I  were 
on  my  way  to  the  guillotine. ' ' 

While  the  Republic  now  had  conquered  peace  throughout 
the  continent,  it  still  was  defied  by  the  island  kingdom  of 
Great  Britain,  and  the  British  navy  continued  to  shut  the 
gates  of  the  sea  against  French  commerce.  The  Directory, 
early  in  1798,  commissioned  Napoleon  General-in-chief  of  the 
Army  of  England,  but  in  ordering  him  to  strike  Great  Britain 
anywhere  while  she  remained  mistress  of  the  seas,  they  were 
simply  commanding  him  to  make  bricks  without  straw — and 
he  chose  to  undertake  that  impossible  task  in  the  land  of 
Joseph  and  Pharaoh. 


74  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

As  he  had  found  Toulon  at  LaSeyne  and  as  he  had  found 
Vienna  at  Mantua,  he  said  now  that  London  was  not  in  Eng- 
land but  in  India.  Rather  than  try  to  cross  the  twenty-five 
miles  of  channel  crowded  with  British  warships,  he  preferred 
to  take  his  chances  of  dodging  the  enemy  in  a  sail  of  1400 
miles  through  the  IMediterranean.  Instead  of  a  headlong 
lunge  at  England,  he  chose  to  "take  her  in  the  rear,"  by 
landing  an  army  in  Egypt,  marching  across  Asia  and  seizing 
the  British  possessions  in  India,  which  the  French  imagined 
were  the  true  source  of  Britain's  wealth  and  power. 

Still  styling  himself  the  Commander-in-chief  of  the  Army 
of  England,  although  it  had  been  privately  rechristened  the 
Army  of  the  Orient,  he  hastily  assembled  his  military  and 
naval  forces  and  a  great  fleet  of  transports  in  the  Mediter- 
ranean at  Toulon.  While  he  advertised  it  as  an  expedition 
against  the  British,  he  kept  its  direction  and  destination  a 
close  secret  among  a  very  few. 

Nearly  all  the  ships  of  the  British  navy  were  guarding  the 
English  coast  and  blockading  the  northern  ports  of  France. 
There  was  not  a  warship  of  that  power  left  in  the  Mediter- 
ranean until  Nelson  arrived  off  Toulon  two  days  before  the 
sailing  time  of  the  French  fleet,  but — and  this  is  only  the 
first  line  in  a  chapter  of  unfortunate  accidents  that  were  to 
befall  him — he  was  blown  away  in  a  storm. 

Notwithstanding  the  secrecy  in  which  Napoleon  had  en- 
veloped his  purpose,  all  adventurous  spirits  were  eager 
blindly  to  follow  his  star.  Every  bright  and  shining  lance 
in  the  army  was  proffered  him.  He  gathered  besides  a  whole 
regiment  of  geographers  and  geometricians,  astronomers  and 
chemists,  mineralogists  and  geologists,  botanists  and  zoolo- 
gists, linguists  and  orientalists,  architects  and  draftsmen, 
actors  and  singers,  poets  and  chroniclers. 

For  the  third  time  in  a  little  more  than  four  years.  Napo- 
leon thus  found  himself  in  Toulon;  in  the  earliest  instance 
as  a  penniless  exile  from  Corsica,  then  as  an  artillery  cap- 
tain at  the  siege  of  the  town,  and  now  as  the  General-in-chief 
of  the  first  military  expedition  the  west  had  ventured  against 
the  east  in  the  500  years  since  the  failure  of  the  Crusades. 


THE  DESCENT  UPON  EGYPT  75 

His  flagship,  L' Orient,  loaded  down  with  2000  passengers, 
freed  herself  with  difficulty  from  the  mud,  and  rounded  the 
point  of  L'Eguillette,  where  the  flowers  of  May  were  bloom- 
ing on  the  earthworks  of  the  Fort  of  Men  Without  Fear. 
As  she  passed  out  into  the  great  harbour  he  stood  on  deck  with 
a  spyglass  to  his  eye,  watching  the  fluttering  handkerchief  of 
Josephine,  who  leaned  on  the  balcony  rail  of  the  port  intend- 
ant's  house,  and  continued  to  wave  a  farewell,  not  only  to 
him  but  also  to  the  manly  youth  by  his  side,  her  own  spyglass 
dimmed  with  tears  at  her  parting  from  her  son  as  well  as  her 
husband. 

Out  of  Toulon  streamed  the  mighty  armada  of  France. 
When  it  was  joined  by  reinforcements  from  other  ports,  it 
ploughed  its  way  through  the  ivory-crested  waves  of  the  blue 
sea  with  the  prows  of  thirteen  ships  of  the  fighting  line,  four- 
teen frigates,  seventy-two  corvettes  and  nearly  400  transport 
vessels,  carrying  35,000  troops  of  the  Republic,  who  no  more 
knew  where  and  why  they  were  going  than  the  weeds  that 
danced  in  the  wake  of  their  boats  on  the  bosom  of  the  waters. 

No  shadow  of  doubt  crossed  the  mind  of  their  General-in- 
chief  as  he  strode  the  quarter  deck  of  L' Orient.  At  last  he 
was  on  the  high  road  to  empire.  Alexander  and  Hannibal, 
Pompey  and  Caesar,  the  Phoenicians,  the  Greeks,  the  Cartha- 
ginians, the  Romans  and  the  Saracens  sailed  the  Mediter- 
ranean on  their  conquests  of  the  earth,  and  Peter  and  Paul 
on  their  conquests  of  the  soul.  It  was  the  theatre  of  the  war 
of  the  Titans,  where  Jupiter  won  the  sovereignty  of  the  world 
and  Neptune  ruled  the  wave;  where  Hercules  laboured  and 
Jason  cruised,  Ulysses  wandered  and  ^neas  voyaged. 

For  on  the  Mediterranean,  mythology  and  history  are  as 
one  and  fables  are  facts  and  facts  are  fables.  The  gods  are 
as  real  as  men,  and  Homer  and  Herodotus,  Virgil  and  Plu- 
tarch are  equally  historians. 

In  this  age  of  steam  and  the  wireless  Napoleon's  expedition 
would  be  smashed  and  sunk  in  a  w^eek.  Even  in  those  days 
of  sails  and  no  telegTaph  it  was  onl}^  by  the  most  incredible 
good  luck  that  he  and  his  big  fleet  floated  safely  over  the 
Mediterranean  for  six  weeks  with  the  greatest  of  British  sail- 


76  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ors  chasing  back  and  forth  and  ransacking  the  sea  to  find 
him. 

Fortunately  for  him  the  enemy  did  not  know  where  he  was 
going  or  what  course  he  was  taking.  While  Nelson  was  fly- 
ing up  and  down  the  European  coast,  on  the  assumption  that 
the  French  were  headed  for  Naples  or  Sicily,  Napoleon  was 
steering  toward  the  African  shore,  passing  outside  of  Corsica, 
Sardinia  and  Sicily  and  making  for  Malta,  whose  outlying 
island  of  Gazo  rose  to  view  after  a  sail  of  nearly  three  weeks. 

In  the  dusk  of  a  June  evening  the  French  fleet  came  to 
anchor  within  a  gunshot  of  the  great  grey  heap  of  masonry 
which  the  Knights  of  St.  John  had  piled  up  for  the  defence  of 
Malta  against  the  Turk.  These  last  of  the  Crusaders,  after 
having  been  driven  from  Jerusalem  to  the  rock  of  Acre  and 
from  Acre  to  the  Island  of  Rhodes,  had  found  refuge  from 
the  Saracens  behind  the  bastions  of  this  barren  island. 

From  the  battlements  of  St.  Elmo  the  eight-pointed  cross 
had  waved  defiance  to  the  crescent  in  stubborn  and  disas- 
trous sieges.  Challenged  now  by  a  nation  of  the  west,  which 
had  torn  down  the  crucifix  from  its  churches  and  did  not 
hold  itself  bound  by  the  agreements  of  Christendom  to  re- 
spect this  outpost  of  the  Christian  world,  those  soldiers  of 
the  Maltese  cross,  who  had  followed  it  for  nearly  800  years, 
furled  their  banner  before  Napoleon  and  gave  him  the  keys 
of  Malta. 

As  Napoleon  sailed  on  from  Malta  and  entered  the  Ionian 
Sea,  Nelson  raced  in  on  the  more  northerly  course.  Both 
were  now  heading  straight  for  Alexandria,  for  the  Admiral 
at  last  had  suspected  that  the  French  were  going  to  Egypt. 
One  day  there  was  nothing  but  the  horizon  and  sixty  miles 
of  water  between  them.  That  night,  indeed  under  a  moon- 
less sky,  Nelson  probably  ran  through  the  fleet  without  seeing 
it.  With  the  impetuosity  of  despair,  the  Briton  flew  on  the 
wind  so  fast  that  he  sailed  past  the  huge,  slowgoing  armada 
and  hauled  up  at  Alexandria.  Next  he  raced  off  toward  the 
Syrian  coast  on  his  wild  hunt. 

As  the  English  Admiral  had  been  forty-eight  hours  too 
early  for  Napoleon  at  Toulon,  he  was  again  forty-eight  hours 


THE  DESCENT  UPON  EGYPT        77 

too  early  for  him  at  Alexandria,  and  the  long  voyage  was 
finished  in  safety.  The  sheik  of  Alexandria  commanded  the 
French  to  go  away,  but  Napoleon  did  not  go.  For  he  was 
in  the  port  of  his  ambition,  within  a  few  pulls  of  the  oar 
from  the  cradle  of  empire  and  the  nursery  of  fame.  Before 
him  lay  the  low  crescented  shore,  where  at  Alexander's  bid- 
ding a  magnificent  city  rose  to  be  the  treasure  house  of  his 
conquest  of  the  universe,  but  where  now  only  a  miserable 
hamlet  huddled  amid  the  noble  ruins.  Beyond,  stretched  the 
magic  east. 

Napoleon's  star  had  not  led  him  unharmed  through  the 
perils  of  the  sea  for  him  to  turn  back  at  the  command  of  an 
ex-slave,  the  sheik  of  Alexandria.  He  assembled  his  ships 
just  beyond  the  town,  where  the  sands  of  the  Libyan  Desert 
roll  down  to  the  sea.  There  in  the  night,  despite  wind  and 
weather  and  the  caution  of  the  naval  commanders,  he  and  a 
detachment  of  his  army  swung  from  rope  ladders  into  the 
small  boats  tossing  in  the  surf  and  waded  dripping  to  the 
shore  of  Egypt. 

The  first  thing  he  did  on  landing  was  to  stretch  himself  on 
the  sand  beside  a  clump  of  date  palms  and  sleep  for  an  hour 
to  the  surging  of  the  waves.  Before  daybreak  he  was  at 
the  walls  of  Alexandria,  on  top  of  which  the  townspeople  had 
noisily  swarmed  to  repel  the  invader,  chiefly  with  Arabic 
prayers  and  curses.  The  French,  however,  quickly  scaled 
the  walls  and  took  the  town. 

Napoleon  was  the  first  man  of  modern  times  to  see  that 
Egypt  was  the  greatest  prize  the  sword  could  win.  Caesar, 
Alexander  and  the  ancient  conquerors  had  made  it  the  key- 
stone in  their  arch  of  conquest.  For  500  years  before  Napo- 
leon's expedition,  Egypt  had  been  abandoned  to  the  Arab 
and  the  Turk,  and  all  but  forgotten  by  Europe,  which  with 
the  discovery  of  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  was  no  longer  de- 
pendent upon  the  humpbacked  ships  of  the  desert.  For  five 
centuries  a  twilight  rested  upon  the  land  of  the  Pharaohs 
and  that  half  a  thousand  years  of  Egyptian  history  is  almost 
as  blank  as  the  era  of  the  Pyramid  builders. 

It  remained  for  the  strategic  eye  of  Napoleon  to  penetrate 


78  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

that  dusk  and  to  see  that  Egypt  still  was  the  centre  of  the 
world.  And  when  he  rapped  at  the  gate  of  Alexandria  he 
startled  her  out  of  an  age  long  sleep.  Over  her  hoary  head 
the  centuries  had  rolled  since  she  drove  the  Crusaders  from 
her  shore  and,  lying  down  to  rest  on  her  sandy  couch,  yielded 
herself  to  the  dreams  of  the  Orient.  The  Christian  dogs  had 
been  beaten  off  and  the  European  barbarian  had  disappeared 
into  his  native  wilderness.  Egj^pt  thought  no  more  about  him 
than  we  think  of  the  grasshoppers  when  they  are  gone. 

AYlien,  therefore,  the  long-haired  boy  of  France  rudely  in- 
vaded her  slumber  she  knew  nothing  of  the  Great  Revolu- 
tion which  had  roused  the  sleeping  nations  of  Europe  and 
which  at  last  was  bidding  her  wake  again.  Egypt  hardly 
remembered  there  was  a  France  and  could  not  imagine  what 
the  French  could  want  of  her.  To  Napoleon's  command  for 
her  to  rise,  therefore,  she  only  yawned  and  begged,  "Please 
go  away  and  let  me  sleep." 

The  Alexandria  of  to-day  is  as  changed  from  the  town  Al- 
exander built  and  Napoleon  captured  as  anything  can  be  in 
the  unchanging  land  of  Egypt.  Out  of  the  desert  of  water 
in  front  of  it  and  the  desert  of  sand  behind  it,  the  minarets 
and  marts  of  a  modern  city  of  400,000  rise  on  the  shore 
where  Napoleon  found  only  a  squalid  village  of  5000  people 
huddled  amid  the  ruins  of  a  splendid  imperial  capital  which 
before  the  opening  of  the  Christian  Era  boasted  a  million 
inhabitants.  Those  figures  reflect  the  vicissitudes  of  Alex- 
andria in  a  period  of  more  than  2000  years. 

Pompey's  Pillar,  which  still  springs  above  the  roofs  and 
towers,  is  the  one  landmark  that  has  survived  most  of  those 
centuries.  But  the  famous  lighthouse  of  Pharos  no  longer 
casts  its  beams  on  a  wondering  world ;  instead,  a  useless  fort 
cumbers  its  site.  The  hill  which  rises  from  among  the  ware- 
houses close  by  the  custom  house  is  still  called  Fort  Napoleon, 
and  the  Oriental  imagination  sometimes  insists  that  Napoleon 
built  it  in  a  night.  Its  summit  is  now  crowned  by  the  signal 
station  of  the  port,  set  in  the  midst  of  trees  and  flowers,  and 
with  its  pennants  of  many  colours  fluttering  in  the  breeze  be- 
neath the  Sultan's  flag.     What  really  gave  the  elevation  its 


THE  DESCENT  UPON  EGYPT        79 

name  was  the  fort  which  Napoleon  established  in  a  night.  It 
lay  outside  the  little  town  of  that  day  and  commanded  the 
place  as  it  now  commands  an  excellent  view  of  the  sea. 

From  another  mound  near  by,  where  Pompey's  polished 
shaft  rises  nearly  seventy  feet  in  a  solid  column  of  red 
granite,  Napoleon  watched  and  directed  the  assault  upon  the 
town  wall  in  the  dawn  of  his  first  day  in  Egypt.  He  prom- 
ised to  inscribe  on  the  pedestal  of  the  pillar  the  names  of  those 
who  fell  in  the  attack,  but  he  failed  to  do  it  and  the  poor 
youths  of  France  missed  immortality.  However,  they  fared 
no  harder  than  the  man  to  whom  this  column  was  raised.  He 
is  utterly  lost  in  the  vulgar  herd  of  conquerors  and  his  pillar 
has  been  misnamed  for  Pompey,  who  was  dead  hundreds  of 
years  before  it  was  sawed  out  of  the  quarry  at  Assouan. 

Napoleon  gave  hardly  more  time  than  the  conventional 
traveller  spares  for  Alexandria.  Most  of  his  army  did  not 
even  see  the  city,  but  were  marched  around  it  toward  the 
Nile,  where  he  himself  hastened  to  overtake  them  in  their  ad- 
vance on  Cairo. 

While  the  tourist  to-day  is  enjoying  as  comfortable  and 
interesting  a  train  ride  of  three  hours  and  a  quarter  over 
the  129  miles  of  rail  between  Alexandria  and  Cairo  as  he 
could  wish,  the  unchanging  landscape  of  Egypt  passes  before 
his  car  window  like  a  reel  of  moving  pictures  in  a  photo  play 
of  the  reign  of  Pharaoh. 

For  time  has  altered  nothing  in  all  the  200  generations  and 
more  since  the  first  faint  light  of  history  twinkled  in  the 
Egyptian  darkness.  The  same  patient  race  of  blue-skirted 
fellahin  are  still  seen,  scratching  with  their  wooden  ploughs  the 
narrow  strip  of  rich  soil  between  the  two  deserts  that  lie  in 
full  view  on  either  hand,  or  laboriously  turning  the  ancient 
water  wheels.  Their  lives  and  ways  seem  to  be  no  more 
touched  by  progress  than  are  those  of  the  heavily  burdened 
strings  of  camels  which  hump  along. 

All  that  countryside  remains  as  desolate  to-day  as  before 
its  fields  first  were  gleaned.  For  the  most  fruitful  soil  in 
the  world  is  cursed  with  the  worst  land  laws  and  the  most  un- 
just system  of  taxation.     Nowhere  else  is  nature  so  bountiful 


80  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

and  hardly  anywhere  else  is  man  so  mean  as  on  those  banks 
of  the  Nile. 

No  wonder  Napoleon's  20,000  soldiers  as  he  marched  them 
through  that  impoverished  region  were  exasperated  almost 
to  the  point  of  mutiny.  They  had  sailed  into  the  harbour  of 
Alexandria  with  their  mouths  watering  for  the  fabled  flesh- 
pots  of  the  land  of  Egypt,  while  their  commander  had  confi- 
dently looked  for  the  Egyptians  with  joyous  acclaim  to  wel- 
come him  as  their  deliverer  from  tyranny. 

Alas,  the  soldiers  found  the  flesh-pots  empty  and  Napoleon 
found  that  the  people  preferred  their  old  yoke  to  a  new  one. 
Liberty,  fraternity  and  equality,  the  magic  watchwords  of  the 
Fl"ench  Revolution  with  which  he  had  conquered  the  hearts 
of  the  Italians,  were  as  sounding  brass  or  a  tinkling  cymbal 
in  the  dull  ears  of  the  wretched  dwellers  in  the  delta. 

The  country  nominally  was  under  the  Sultan  of  Turkey 
but  the  martial  Mamelukes  really  ruled  it  in  that  day  as  the 
British  are  its  real  rulers  in  our  day.  After  long  ages  of 
grinding  despotism,  hope  was  dead  beyond  revival  in  the 
breasts  of  the  Egyptians,  The  miserable  habitations  of  the 
people  only  mocked  the  hunger  of  the  foraging  soldiers  who 
found  nothing  in  the  lean  larders  fit  for  the  French  palate. 
To  set  an  example  of  self  denial  Napoleon  himself  slept  with- 
out a  tent  in  the  midst  of  his  army  and  at  meal  time  limited 
his  fare  to  a  dish  of  lentils. 

Instead  of  living  off  the  fat  of  this  land  for  which  the 
children  of  Israel  sighed  and  murmured  when  Moses  had  led 
them  out  of  Egypt,  the  invading  army  advanced  with  its 
supplies  jealously  guarded  in  its  centre  for  fear  of  losing 
even  what  it  had  brought  from  home,  assailed  as  it  was  by 
Mamelukes  and  Bedouins,  who  forever  hovered  on  the  hori- 
zon. 

"When  Napoleon  left  Alexandria  he  said  that  St.  Louis,  the 
latest  French  commander  to  invade  Egypt,  took  four  months 
to  march  to  Cairo  but  that  he  would  do  it  in  two  weeks.  In 
spite  of  all  the  hardships  that  presented  themselves  he  kept 
the  schedule  to  the  hour.  The  morning  of  the  14th  day  was 
just  breaking  over  the  IMokattom  hills  when  three  great  heaps 


THE  DESCENT  UPON  EGYPT  81 

of  yellow  limestones  rose  to  view  on  the  edge  of  the  Libyan 
desert  and  he  fired  the  fainting  spirits  of  his  tired  and  home- 
sick soldiers  with  the  memorable  reminder  that  from  those 
Pyramids  of  Ghizeli  forty  centuries  looked  down  upon  them. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  PYRAMIDS 

1798-1799     AGE   28-29 

AS  Napoleon  marched  to  the  conquest  of  the  Egyptian 
capital  in  midsummer  of  1798,  the  streets  of  Carlo 
resounded  night  and  day  with  the  shrill  pipes  and  mo- 
notonous drum  beats  of  the  dervishes,  made  familiar  to  us  by 
midway  imitations.  At  the  first  warning  of  the  enemy's  ad- 
vance the  ulema,  or  wise  men,  marshalled  the  children  in  long 
processions,  and  led  them  again  and  again  through  the  nar- 
row, winding  lanes  of  the  city,  their  young  voices  chanting  an 
appeal  for  divine  deliverance  from  the  unbelieving  hosts  of 
France. 

Napoleon,  on  the  other  hand,  invoked  neither  Allah  nor 
Jehovah,  but  the  spirit  of  the  ages,  when  he  reminded  his 
troops  that  from  yonder  Pyramids  the  centuries  looked  down 
upon  them.  What  a  wonderful  view  point  those  centuries 
enjoyed  atop  the  great  cairn  of  Cheops,  that  memorable  July 
morning  in  the  year  1798,  what  well  chosen  reserved  seats ! 

The  journey  out  from  Cairo  to  Ghizeh  and  its  Pyramids  is 
no  longer  made  by  ferry  down  the  Nile  and  thence  by  camels 
or  mule  as  in  other  days.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  only  a 
twenty-minute  spin  in  an  automobile  or  a  forty-minute  ride 
in  the  company  of  sheeted  Egyptians  aboard  a  trolley  car, 
with  a  curtained  section  for  the  veiled,  dark-eyed  sorceresses 
of  the  Nile.  Handsome  bridges  arch  the  most  historic  of 
rivers,  the  veritable  stream  of  time,  first  to  a  parklike  island, 
and  then  to  the  farther  bank,  where  the  town  of  Ghizeh 
sprawls  in  the  sun.  Beyond  Ghizeh  a  broad,  almost  straight 
avenue,  five  miles  long,  with  the  trolley  tracks  running  be- 
neath a  row  of  shady  lebbakh  trees,  stretches  across  a  plain, 

82 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  PYRAMIDS  83 

where  little  irrigating  rivulets  run  about  to  refresh  the  soil 
in  its  never  ending  hand  to  hand  struggle  with  the  desert. 
The  road  itself  is  Bonapartist,  having  been  laid  out  by  the 
Khedive  as  an  honour  and  convenience  for  the  Empress  Eu- 
genie at  the  time  she  visited  Eg>'pt  to  open  the  Suez  Canal. 

Buffalos  are  by  the  roadside  and  little  white  herons  are  fly- 
ing over  a  mud  village  of  the  fellahin.  Beyond  that  clump 
of  huts,  the  Pyramids  lift  their  bulk  above  the  billows  of  sand 
which  have  beaten  against  their  foundations  nearly  5000  years 
and  which  roll  upon  them  like  the  engulfing  waves  of  the 
sea.  Indeed  a  real  sea  wall  five  feet  high  is  necessary  for  the 
protection  of  the  road  as  it  approaches  its  destination  and  is 
all  that  saves  it  from  being  submerged.  Its  last  section  is 
no  more  than  a  pier  or  diked  causeway,  with  a  big  hotel  and 
pretty  garden  rising  at  the  end  like  a  pier  head  out  of  an 
ocean  of  sand. 

There  still  remains  a  long,  steep  climb  to  the  Pyramids  in 
a  walled  and  paved  trench  with  the  burning  sun  above  and 
the  burning  sand  all  about.  But  the  automobiles  and  trol- 
leys stop  at  the  hotel  and  deliver  their  passengers  over 
to  the  mercies  of  the  desert  and  its  children,  a  tribe  of  howl- 
ing Arabs  with  a  herd  of  camels  and  donkeys. 

The  visitor  is  well  rewarded  for  his  momentary  trials. 
Surely  Cheops  is  the  most  wonderful  grandstand  from  which 
a  battle  ever  was  seen  or  a  battlefield  reviewed.  Overhead 
bends  the  splendid  blue  vault  of  the  Egyptian  sky.  Behind 
rolls  the  tempestuous  desert.  Below  flows  the  Nile.  Beyond 
the  river,  the  domes  and  minarets  of  Cairo  rise  toward  the 
cloudless  heavens  in  white  and  gold  against  a  background  of 
bare  yellow  hills.  These  stand  out  on  the  eastern  horizon 
like  videttes  guarding  the  green  and  slender  valley  from  the 
oncoming  sands  of  Arabia,  forever  striving  to  join  forces 
with  the  sands  of  Libya  and  bury  valley  and  city  and  river  in 
one  vast  and  desolate  waste. 

Off  in  front  some  eight  miles  away  there  is  a  cluster  of  date 
palms  about  the  village  of  Embabeh  by  the  riverside.  At  the 
edge  of  that  little  grove  the  celebrated  Battle  of  the  Pyra- 
mids was  fought.     There  the  west  met  the  east  in  combat  for 


84  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

the  first  time  in  500  years,  when  the  Mamelukes  made  their 
one  and  only  stand  against  the  advancing  French. 

On  that  plain  10,000  tiirbaned  horsemen,  each  mounted 
man  with  three  or  four  footmen  to  serve  him,  were  drawn  up 
to  challenge  Napoleon,  their  shirts  of  steel  and  their  gay,  ori- 
ental accoutrements  glistening  in  the  sun.  Behind  this  line 
of  brilliant  cavalry  there  were  thousands  of  janissaries,  while 
within  the  earthworks  of  Embabeh  there  were  gathered  more 
thousands  of  raw  conscripts  with  many  cannon. 

But  the  Mamelukes  in  their  self-confidence  relied  on  them- 
selves alone  to  strike  do\vn  and  trample  the  French  beneath 
their  horses'  hoofs.  Macaulay  says  that  their  commander, 
Mourad  Bey,  could  not  believe  that  his  little  antagonist  who 
rode  like  a  butcher  was  the  greatest  warrior  in  Europe,  while 
the  Mamelukes  felt  nothing  but  contempt  for  infantry.  A 
man  was  no  soldier  in  their  eyes  who  did  not  have  a  horse, 
and  they  laughed  as  they  saw  Napoleon's  troops  trotting 
toward  them  like  dogs. 

When  the  French  came  within  striking  distance,  the  Mame- 
lukes, with  their  weird  war  cry,  dashed  at  the  foot  soldiers  of 
France  to  ■find  themselves  beating  against  solid  squares  of  steel 
and  fire.  Dazed  at  first  and  then  enraged  they  rode  again 
and  again  to  the  slaughter. 

But  when  they  saw  their  army  broken  into  two  parts  and 
the  irresistible  French  squares  wedging  in  between,  they  fled 
in  mad  panic.  One  division  galloped  over  to  the  Pyramids 
and  vanished  into  the  desert,  while  another  raced  into  the 
village  of  Embabeh,  from  behind  the  guns  of  which  they  sal- 
lied forth  once  more  only  to  fall  before  the  unwavering 
squares  like  grass  before  a  steam  mowing  machine.  Those 
who  escaped  from  the  French  leaped  from  their  useless 
horses  into  the  Nile,  along  with  a  mob  of  other  fugitives. 
Most  of  them  swam  to  safety,  but  history  makes  the  grew- 
some  record  that  after  the  victors  had  finished  robbing  the 
thousands  of  dead  bodies  that  bestrew  the  plain  they  amused 
themselves  by  angling  for  the  drowned,  who  numbered  1500. 
The  character  of  the  conflict  is  established  by  the  number  of 
French  killed,  which  was  30. 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  PYRAMIDS  85 

Such  was  the  Battle  of  the  Pyramids,  a  combat  between  the 
middle  ages  and  modern  times.  In  a  military  sense,  it  was 
not  above  the  level  of  a  massacre,  but  it  Avas  a  great  battle  in 
its  consequences. 

It  shattered  forever  the  despotism  of  the  Mamelukes,  those 
alien  slaves  who,  revolting  against  their  masters,  had  ruled 
Egypt  for  nearly  six  centuries.  And  it  did  far  more  than 
that.  When  the  blue  squares  of  France  broke  through  the 
Mameluke  line  on  that  plain  down  by  the  little  grove  of 
date  palms,  they  opened  the  lane  by  which  the  west  passed 
through  to  the  east.  From  the  field  of  the  Battle  of  the  Pyra- 
mids, Occidental  civilisation  started  on  its  eventful  journey 
round  the  earth  to  the  banks  of  the  Ganges,  to  the  shore  of 
the  Sea  of  Japan  and  over  the  Great  Wall  of  China. 

Napoleon  himself  was  not  to  realise  his  dream  of  empire 
in  the  Orient,  but  there  by  the  Nile  his  sword  cut  the  first 
breach  in  the  barrier  with  which  Islam  had  so  long  shut  in 
the  peoples  of  Asia  and  shut  out  Christendom  and  the  modern 
world.  Here,  as  in  Italy  and  everywhere,  that  sword  of  his 
was  only  the  highly  efficient  instrument  of  the  Great  Revo- 
lution, on  whose  red  anvil  it  was  forged,  for  opening  the 
way  to  new  institutions  and  the  unity  of  mankind. 

When  night  fell  on  the  field  of  Erababeh  the  camp  fires  of 
Napoleon  lit  up  the  Pyramids  of  Ghizeh,  and  from  the  lofty 
summit  of  the  tomb  of  Cheops  the  astronomers  of  France  be- 
held, though  faintly,  the  constellation  of  the  southern  cross, 
while  French  sentries  patrolled  the  shadow  of  the  Sphinx  in 
its  haunted  hollow. 

There  is  a  tradition  among  the  Arabs  of  the  Pj^ramids  that 
all  the  scars  of  time  and  the  wounds  of  a  hundred  wars, 
which  the  Sphinx  carries,  were  inflicted  by  Napoleon's 
soldiers,  who  used  its  mystifying  and  majestic  countenance  as 
a  target.  That,  however,  is  only  a  legend  for  the  tourist. 
Long  before  the  discovery  of  gunpowder,  the  Arabs  had  laid 
iconoclastic  hands  on  the  beard  of  this  god  of  the  desert — for 
the  Sphinx  of  Ghizeh  is  not  a  woman — and  it  was  the  ]\Iame- 
lukes  themselves  who  made  a  target  of  his  inscrutable  face 
and  shot  away  the  nose. 


86  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

It  was  more  than  a  week  after  the  battle  when  Napoleon 
himself  crossed  the  river  and  entered  Cairo.  He  had  no  more 
than  established  his  headquarters  in  the  midst  of  an  un- 
friendly city,  cowed  by  fear  in  the  presence  of  ''the  sultan  of 
fire, ' '  than  he  was  called  away  to  the  desert  to  beat  back  the 
IMamelukes  who  were  gathering  again.  There,  while  in  Mar- 
niont's  tent  on  the  dreary  waste,  the  staggering  news  came  to 
him  that  the  French  naval  fleet  which  conveyed  him  to  the 
East  had  been  utterly  destroyed  in  the  Battle  of  the  Nile 
on  August  1st.  He  had  dodged  Nelson  all  the  way  from 
Toulon  to  Alexandria,  but  the  British  Admiral  had  found 
the  hiding  place  of  his  fighting  ships  in  the  Bay  of  Aboukir, 
which  is  one  of  the  forty  mouths  of  the  Nile,  and  had  cap- 
tured or  sunk  them  all. 

The  folly  of  the  Eg>'ptian  expedition  had  received  a  ter- 
rible crown.  Only  two  really  serviceable  French  warships 
remained  afloat  in  all  the  Mediterranean.  The  mistress  of 
the  seas  literally  had  marooned  Napoleon  on  the  sands  of 
Egypt.  A  sorrier  plight  could  hardly  be  imagined  in  the 
chances  of  war. 

To  a  man  of  his  force,  however,  difficulties  and  disasters 
are  only  hurdles  to  be  leaped.  He  concealed  his  feelings, 
even  from  those  who  looked  on  in  the  moment  he  received 
this  hard  blow,  and  at  once  turned  toward  all  a  confident 
front.  "This  is  the  hour,"  he  said,  "when  characters  of  a 
superior  order  should  show  themselves.  An  obligation  to  do 
great  things  is  laid  upon  us.  Seas  which  we  do  not  command 
separate  us  from  France,  but  no  seas  divide  Africa  from  Asia. 
Here  we  will  found  an  empire." 

Knowing  that  the  Cairenes  would  be  emboldened  by  Nel- 
son's victory,  he  hastened  back  to  his  headquarters  in  the 
home  of  Elfi  Bey  by  the  shore  of  a  pond  at  the  edge  of  the 
old  town.  That  pond  is  now  the  principal  square  of  the  city, 
the  Ezbekiyeh,  which  is  the  very  heart  of  modern  Cairo. 

Tourists,  rejoicing  in  their  first  white  helmets,  and  smoking 
Egyptian  cigarettes  in  wicker  chairs  among  the  palms  on  the 
broad  porch  of  their  hotel,  while  they  watch  the  passing  show 
of  the  Orient,  have  the  romantic  sense  that  they  are  charac- 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  PYRAMIDS  87 

ters  in  some  one  of  the  many  six  biggest  sellers  whose  authors 
have  worked  up  this  scene  on  the  terrace  at  Shepheard's. 
Probably  few  of  them  are  aware  that  the  first  party  of  tour- 
ists to  find  quarters  where  this  hotel  now  stands  was  per- 
sonally conducted  by  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  and  that  where  a 
European  bookseller  has  his  shop  near  by,  the  palace  walls  of 
Elfi  Bey  rose  when  Egypt  was  ruled  by  the  Little  Corporal. 

Over  beyond  the  Ezbekiyeh,  where  the  plashing  of  the 
waters  among  the  tall  palms  is  drowned  by  the  clangour  of 
trolley  cars,  there  was  an  open  field  in  other  days.  There 
Napoleon  planned  a  grand  balloon  ascension  to  distract  and 
impress  the  public  mind,  for  he  had  brought  from  France  the 
first  balloon  ever  seen  in  Egypt.  But  the  air  like  the  sea 
failed  the  conqueror  of  the  land.  The  amazement  of  the 
Egyptians  was  quickly  succeeded  by  amusement,  their  ex- 
clamations of  awe  by  shouts  of  derision  as  they  saw  his  gas- 
bag collapse  and  tumble  to  earth. 

He  tried  also  to  move  the  sheiks  and  wise  men  to  wonder 
by  an  exhibition  which  his  French  scientists  gave,  of  elec- 
tricity, chemistry  and  other  strange  experiments  in  natural 
science.  He  succeeded  with  the  more  advanced  minds  in  his 
audience,  but  many  of  his  guests  viewed  the  demonstration 
with  stolid  indifference  as  unequal  to  the  marvels  of  eastern 
magic. 

"Let  them  make  me  be  in  Morocco  and  here  at  the  same 
time,"  was  a  challenge  which  one  of  the  sheiks  gave.  When 
the  scientific  men  told  him  such  a  thing  was  impossible  the 
sheik  stroked  his  beard  and  turned  away  with  contempt  for 
the  sorcerers  of  the  west  who  could  only  do  tricks  with  bottles 
and  wires  but  could  not  make  a  man  be  in  two  places  at  once. 

Still  another  effort  to  show  the  people  the  usefulness  of 
western  science  was  made  at  the  nilometer  on  the  Island  of 
Rhoda  in  the  oldest  of  old  Cairo.  This  is  the  ancient  gauge 
of  Egyptian  prosperity,  which  for  nearly  1200  years  has 
measured  the  rise  of  the  Nile  and  indicated  the  lack  or 
abundance  of  water  for  the  overflowing  of  the  thirsty  delta. 
When  Napoleon  found  that  the  Mamelukes  were  accustomed 
to  fixing  the  tax  rate  the  moment  the  nilometer  indicated  a 


88  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

good  supply  of  water,  he  ordered  an  investigation  by  his 
engineers,  who  dug  down  and  unearthed  a  fraudulent  device 
for  manipulating  the  gauge  in  the  interests  of  higher  taxation. 

Only  the  few  with  more  advanced  minds,  however,  wel- 
comed the  labours  of  the  scientists  from  France,  and  the  lab- 
oratory, the  Egyptian  institute  and  the  library  which  they 
established.     The  multitude  hated  everything  that  was  new. 

The  construction  of  a  canal  across  Egypt  was  part  of  Na- 
poleon's Oriental  dream,  and  he  carried  with  him  the  engi- 
neers to  plan  it.  The  idea  was  by  no  means  original.  For 
those  narrowly  divided  seas  had  been  united  by  Darius  500 
years  before  Christ,  and  the  Macedonian  Ptolemies  had  wid- 
ened the  Persian's  canal  and  erected  a  system  of  locks.  But 
by  the  reign  of  Cleopatra,  Darius'  ditch  had  silted  up,  and 
it  remained  for  the  Romans  under  Trajan  to  restore  it  once 
more  in  the  first  of  the  Christian  centuries.  The  heedless 
Arabs,  however,  left  the  canal  to  the  winds  and  the  sands 
and  the  desert  swallowed  it  again.  When  Napoleon  came, 
the  Egyptians  had  forgotten  even  its  course,  and  his  engineers 
from  France  invented  one  of  those  impossibilities  with  which 
the  cautious  and  the  judicious  were  forever  fettering  his  eagle 
flights. 

The  learned  academicians  somehow  made  the  discovery, 
apparently  without  the  trouble  of  taking  measurements,  that 
the  Red  Sea  was  nearly  thirty-three  feet  higher  than  the 
waters  of  the  JMediterranean.  They  warned  the  young  Gen- 
eral-in-chief  that  if  he  dug  a  simple  sea-level  canal  he  would 
drown  Egypt,  and  he  dropped  the  project,  leaving  it  to  be 
carried  out  in  the  reign  of  another  Napoleon,  nearly  three 
quarters  of  a  century  afterward,  when  Ferdinand  de  Les- 
seps,  an  unscientific  French  consul,  a  cousin  of  the  Empress 
Eugenie,  found  that  the  two  seas  were  virtually  on  a  level. 

Napoleon  was  the  first  to  undertake  the  heavy  and  thank- 
less task  of  cleaning  up  and  stirring  up  the  slothful  east. 
The  easy-going,  disorganised  Egyptians  were  exasperated  by 
his  passion  for  cleanliness,  order,  precision  and  efficiency. 
Every  innovation  for  the  purpose  of  improving  their  lives 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  PYRAMIDS  89 

and  easing  their  labours  was  resented  and  resisted.  Work- 
men who  were  engaged  to  carry  bricks  on  public  construc- 
tion indignantly  rebelled  against  the  wheelbarrow  as 
if  it  were  the  vehicle  of  evil.  The  Egyptians  had  carried 
their  bricks  on  their  heads  since  the  strike  of  the  children  of 
Israel,  and  any  other  method  was  to  them  an  invention  of 
the  devil,  an  impiety  which  they  refused  to  endure. 

Religious  differences  were  the  most  prolific  source  of  trou- 
ble. Napoleon  had  done  his  best  to  avert  them  by  all  manner 
of  flirtation  with  JNIahometanism.  He  promoted  and  partici- 
pated in  the  fete  of  Mahomet ;  he  even  ordered  an  Oriental 
costume  for  himself  and  did  everything  short  of  becoming  a 
Mahometan,  as  some  historians  have  accused  him  of  doing. 

The  French  had,  however,  most  stupidly  outraged  the  feel- 
ings of  the  faithful  by  stabling  their  horses  in  the  mosque  of 
el  Azhar.  This  Gamia  el  Azhar,  the  greatest  university  in 
all  Islam,  is  still  one  of  the  most  interesting  sights  of  Cairo. 
Within  its  walls  the  lamp  of  learning  was  first  lighted  when 
Oxford  and  Paris  and  Heidelberg  yet  sat  in  primeval  dark- 
ness, and  its  priests  have  kept  the  wick  trimmed  for  upwards 
of  900  years. 

Napoleon  himself  surely  was  too  wise  to  have  desecrated 
the  venerable  mosque,  and  when  the  priests  complained  that 
it  had  been  turned  into  a  stable  he  immediately  restored  it  to 
them.  All  his  efforts  to  bridge  the  gulf  between  himself  and 
Islam  were  unavailing,  however,  when  six  weeks  after  the 
Battle  of  the  Nile,  Turkey  took  sides  with  the  British  and 
declared  a  holy  war  on  the  French.  The  circle  of  his  mis- 
fortunes was  now  complete. 

The  Sultan  being  the  spiritual  head  of  the  IMoslem  world, 
his  declaration  of  war  aroused  the  religious  fanaticism  of  the 
Egyptians.  From  the  minarets  of  Cairo,  maledictions  were 
called  down  upon  the  French  in  a  language  they  could  not 
understand,  and  in  October  the  people  rose  in  a  frenzied  out- 
break against  the  foreigners.  Cairo  was  no  more  than  beaten 
back  into  sullen  obedience  when  the  gathering  of  an  army  in 
Syria,  beneath  the  crescent  of  the  Sultan  and  under  the  com- 


90  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

mand  of  the  Pasha  of  Acre,  who  had  merited  the  name  of 
Dejezzar,  or  "the  Butcher,"  again  gravely  threatened  the 
French  occupation  of  Egypt. 

Thus  at  twenty-nine,  Napoleon  was  alone  with  his  heavy 
responsibilities  and  his  youthful  ambitions  in  the  vast  alien 
world  of  the  east.  If  he  turned  back  it  was  only  to  look 
across  1500  miles  of  sea,  with  Britannia  ruling  the  w^ave.  If 
he  stood  still  in  Egypt  it  was  only  to  give  the  Turks,  in  alli- 
ance with  the  British,  an  opportunity  to  swarm  down  upon 
him  and  overwhelm  him  at  their  leisure.  To  avoid  being 
caught  in  a  trap,  he  must  hasten  to  surprise  the  Sultan  be- 
fore he  could  marshal  his  hordes.  Although  he  could  invade 
Asia  with  a  little  band  of  only  12,000  men,  he  was  not  with- 
out a  glimmer  of  hope  that  after  whipping  the  Butcher  of 
Acre,  he  might  be  able  to  march  across  Persia,  conquer  Eng- 
land in  India  and  still  "take  Europe  in  the  rear." 

The  old  caravan  route  to  Syria  is  marked  at  every  step  by 
footprints  in  the  sands  of  time.  As  Napoleon  set  out  upon  it 
in  February,  1798,  he  was  thrilled  by  the  thought  that  at  last 
his  feet  were  in  the  path  of  Alexander.  Notwithstanding  the 
disappointments  that  had  crowded  upon  him  since  the  day 
he  landed  on  the  shore  of  the  Orient  he  still  cherished  the 
dream  that  this  might  be  his  own  pathway  to  an  eastern  em- 
pire which  would  rival  the  great  Macedonian's  and  make  him 
the  master  of  the  world  from  the  Ganges  to  the  Seine. 


CHAPTER  XII 
INTO  THE  HOLY  LAND 

1799     AGE  29 

THE  traveller  from  Egypt  to  Palestine  goes  to-day  by 
rail  through  the  land  of  Goshen  to  Port  Said  and 
thence  by  boat  to  Jaffa.  For  Napoleon  there  was  no 
iron  road,  only  a  trail  in  the  sand,  and  no  safe  passage  by 
water,  where  British  ships  were  scouting  along  the  coast. 

After  more  than  a  century  had  passed,  the  situation  was 
strangely  changed  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  in  1914.  In 
this  later  instance,  England  occupied  Egypt,  and  France 
was  her  ally,  while  Turkey  in  declaring  war  upon  her,  had 
the  support  of  Germany.  And  the  Turco-German  forces,  in 
their  plans  of  an  Egyptian  invasion,  were  confronted  by  the 
same  problem  that  troubled  the  French  in  the  matter  of  mov- 
ing their  big  guns.  Napoleon  was  obliged  to  send  his  heavy 
siege  artillery  by  sea,  because  it  could  not  be  dragged  across 
the  desert.  It  was  enough  for  his  army  to  drag  its  feet  over 
the  more  than  150  miles  of  hot  sand  drifts  and  for  the  long 
camel  trains  to  bear  the  burden  of  food  and  ammunition. 

For  a  week  and  more,  in  February,  1799,  his  soldiers 
marched  in  a  land  that  offered  not  a  morsel  of  food  and 
where  there  was  only  an  occasional  bunch  of  desert  weeds  for 
the  hundreds  of  beasts  with  which  they  advanced.  For  there 
is  hardly  an  oasis  in  all  the  miserable  desert  of  El  Tih.  En- 
gineers went  ahead  to  clear  the  wells,  which  were  merely 
holes  in  the  sand.  But  the  army  had  to  march  in  divisions 
a  day  apart  lest  the  wells  be  drunk  dry  at  a  single  gulp,  and 
the  bitter  brackish  water  was  measured  out  like  brandy  to 
the  thirsty  mouths  of  the  soldiers. 

In  the  skirmishes  Napoleon  had  developed  the  camel  as  an 

91 


92  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

efficient  aid  for  IMurat's  cavalry.  With  two  armed  men  on 
the  back  of  this  steed  of  the  desert  it  became  a  thing  of  terror 
even  to  the  Arab  horsemen.  Fortunately  they  did  not  molest 
the  Syrian  expedition  and  the  army  encountered  no  human 
enemy  on  the  long,  silent,  burning  road  through  the  desert, 
which  Napoleon  said  "was  the  image  of  immensity  to  my 
thoughts.  It  had  neither  beginning  nor  end.  It  was  an 
ocean  for  the  foot  of  man." 

Out  of  a  vast  waste  El  Arish,  the  first  outpost  of  Asia,  rises 
in  the  valley  of  the  Biblical  "River  of  Egypt."  Before  it 
stretches  a  beautiful  irrigated  plain  where  date  palms  and 
fig  trees  cast  their  cool  shadows  and  where  the  shining  green 
of  the  vines  is  a  most  welcome  sight  to  eyes  long  blinded  by 
the  glare  of  sky  and  sand. 

El  Arish  is  so  old  that  history  cannot  count  its  years.  Its 
camels  and  mules  drink  from  a  stone  trough  that  was  once 
the  sarcophagus  of  a  proud  Egyptian,  and  it  was  only  the  day 
before  yesterday,  in  its  reckoning  of  time,  when  Baldwin  I, 
King  of  Jerusalem,  lay  down  to  die  within  its  walls.  It  is 
to-day  a  town  of  livid  white  houses  and  perhaps  7000  people, 
who  plunge  about  ankle  deep  in  its  sandy  streets  as  they  go 
to  bend  their  heads  to  Mecca  in  the  mosque  or  to  swell  the 
chaffering  hubbub  of  the  bazars. 

When  Napoleon  stood  before  its  gate  he  had  no  artillery 
with  which  to  bombard  the  garrison  behind  the  walls.  There- 
fore, he  set  up  behind  his  earthworks  twenty  cross  sticks  and 
hung  a  soldier's  coat  and  hat  on  each.  History  asks  us  to 
believe  that  the  simple  Turks  blazed  away  at  those  scarecrows 
three  days,  until  their  ammunition  was  nearly  exhausted, 
when  they  surrendered. 

Napoleon  resumed  his  toilsome  march  in  the  desert  from 
El  Arish,  an  experience  made  doubly  vexatious  by  Kleber's 
division  missing  its  way  and  wandering  about  for  forty-eight 
hours  without  coming  upon  a  well.  Some  of  the  men,  dis- 
gusted and  discouraged,  had  angrily  broken  their  muskets. 
When  they  came  up,  the  General-in-chief  only  gently  chided 
the  poor,  half -crazed  mutineers.     "It  would  have  been  bet- 


INTO  THE  HOLY  LAND  93 

ter,"  he  told  them,  'Ho  stick  your  heads  in  the  sand  and  die 
with  honour  than  to  give  yourselves  up  to  disorder." 

Soon  the  weary  men  of  France  looked  upon  the  verdant 
and  fertile  plains  of  the  Philistines,  smiling  a  spring-time  wel- 
come, while  the  storied  mountains  of  Judea  loomed  blue 
against  the  eastern  horizon.  At  last  the  desert  was  left  be- 
hind, with  all  its  strange  trials,  not  least  among  which  was  the 
necessity  of  messing  on  camels,  asses  and  dogs. 

Before  the  French,  rose  the  walls  and  mosques  of  Gaza,  the 
proud  city  of  the  Philistines,  the  doors  of  whose  gates,  gate- 
posts, bar  and  all,  Samson  carried  off  on  his  stalwart  shoul- 
ders, after  having  slain  his  thousand  with  the  jawbone  of  an 
ass.  There,  too,  at  Gaza  the  lusty  Danite  grew  his  second 
head  of  hair  in  place  of  the  locks  Delilah  had  shorn  and,  there, 
with  his  strength  thus  renewed,  he  pulled  down  the  pillars 
of  the  house  while  3000  Philistines  stood  on  the  roof  to  mock 
him. 

After  having  been  sacked  forty  times,  Gaza  still  is  an  im- 
portant and  busy  place  of  40,000  population.  Alexander 
had  to  besiege  the  town  two  months  before  he  could  enter  its 
gates,  but  its  latest  captor,  Napoleon,  took  it  without  firing  a 
shot.  Then  he  marched  on  toward  Jaffa,  across  the  renowned 
battlefields  of  David,  where  the  ark  of  the  covenant  was  the 
prize  of  victory.  Up  on  the  bordering  mountain  side  is  the 
scene  of  the  duel  with  Goliath,  where  with  the  pebbles  of  a 
brook  that  armoured  giant  of  Gath  was  laid  low. 

When  the  beauty  of  Israel  lay  slain  upon  the  high  places, 
and  David  wept  for  Saul,  he  saw,  even  through  his  tears, 
this  land  of  his  hated  enemy  filled  with  exultation  over  his 
loss,  and  he  cried  out :  ' '  Tell  it  not  in  Gath,  publish  it  not  in 
the  streets  of  Ascalon,  lest  the  daughters  of  the  Philistines 
rejoice."  There  are  few  indeed  to  be  told  in  Gath  to-day, 
for  a  wretched  huddle  of  Arab  huts  is  all  that  is  left  of 
the  once  warlike  city,  while  orchard  trees  and  onion  patches 
cover  the  streets  of  Ascalon,  the  birthplace  of  Herod  the 
Great. 

The  French  marched  over  the  fields  of  Philistia  in  early 


94  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

March  and  their  beauty  took  Napoleon  by  surprise.  He  lik- 
ened the  scene  to  the  landscape  of  Lan^iedoc,  about  Toulouse, 
in  southern  France.  It  is  indeed  a  lovely  land,  a  veritable 
garden  of  wild  flowers  and  a  riot  of  colour. 

Napoleon  steered  his  course  toward  the  tower  of  the  forty 
martyrs  at  Eamleh,  where  the  Franciscans  welcomed  him  to 
their  convent,  which  stands  on  the  traditional  site  of  the  house 
of  Joseph  of  Arimathea.  Now  the  good  fathers  not  only 
show  their  visitors  the  altar  dedicated  to  the  rich  man  who 
came  among  the  poor  Galilean  outcasts  at  the  foot  of  the 
cross  and,  taking  the  body  of  Jesus,  laid  it  in  his  own  tomb, 
but  they  exhibit  also  the  room  of  the  young  General-in-chief 
of  France. 

Through  the  town  of  Ramleh  runs  one  of  the  two  railroads 
of  Palestine,  that  from  Jaffa  to  Jerusalem,  where  the  pil- 
grims to  the  Holy  City  are  drawn  up  into  the  mountains  by 
locomotives  that  were  first  built  for  the  use  of  the  French  in 
the  construction  of  the  Panama  Canal.  The  ancient  high- 
way to  Jerusalem  also  passes  by  the  town,  and  Bourrienne 
suggested  to  Napoleon  that  he  march  to  the  city  of  David. 
But  his  chief  turned  aside  from  Jerusalem  as  he  had  from 
Rome.  ' '  I  am  not  •  ambitious  for  the  fate  of  Cassius, ' '  he 
said. 

With  his  back  to  the  Judean  Mountains,  he  marched  on 
Jaffa,  past  Lydda,  at  whose  gate,  according  to  the  prophecy 
of  Mahomet,  Christ  will  slay  Antichrist  on  the  last  day. 
Lydda  boasts  above  all  that  it  was  the  scene  of  the  martyrdom 
of  St.  George,  the  Christianized  soldier  of  Rome  who  rescued 
the  maiden  from  the  dragon,  and  it  was  there  by  his  tradi- 
tional grave  that  Richard  Coeur  de  Lion  adopted  St.  George 
as  the  patron  saint  of  England. 

When  Napoleon  arrived  before  the  walls  of  Jaffa  he  found 
a  garrison  of  4000  Turks,  with  forty  guns,  determined  with 
Moslem  fanaticism  to  resist  his  entry  into  the  town.  While 
he  was  directing  the  assault  on  the  place,  a  musket  ball  carried 
away  his  hat  and  struck  dead  a  colonel  who  stood  behind  him, 
and  who  was  five  feet  ten  inches  tall.     "That  is  the  second 


INTO  THE  HOLY  LAND  95 

time,"  the  Little  Corporal  remarked,  "that  I  owe  my  life  to 
my  height." 

After  two  days  of  bombardment,  the  French  rushed  into 
Jaffa  with  orders  to  kill  all  persons  in  arms,  when  some  Al- 
banians shouted  from  the  windows  of  a  big  khan,  or  Arabian 
inn,  that  they  with  2000  other  survivors  of  the  Turkish  gar- 
rison had  taken  refuge  in  the  khan  and  would  fight  to  the 
death  or  surrender  only  on  condition  that  their  lives  be 
spared.  Notwithstanding  the  orders  were  to  "take  no  pris- 
oners" in  a  town  that  had  to  be  carried  by  storm,  and  whose 
governor  had  cut  off  the  head  of  a  messenger,  the  terms  were 
accepted. 

"Why  in  the  devil's  name  have  they  done  this?"  Napoleon 
exclaimed  as  he  saw  from  his  tent  the  band  of  captives  ap- 
proaching. He  was  without  food  for  prisoners,  without  ships 
to  send  them  away  from  the  theatre  of  war,  and  even  without 
men  to  spare  for  a  prison  guard.  If  he  set  them  free  they 
would  hasten  on  to  join  the  army  of  Dejezzar,  at  Acre.  In- 
deed many  of  them,  he  said,  were  men  he  had  paroled  at  the 
capture  of  El  Arish.  "What  do  you  expect  me  to  do  with 
them?"  he  angrily  demanded. 

Their  fate  was  inevitable.  In  a  conflict  between  civilisa- 
tion and  barbarism,  the  civilised  force  sinks  to  the  level  of 
the  barbarian.  It  is  the  old  familiar  story,  heard  around  the 
world,  of  fighting  the  devil  with  fire.  If  it  had  remained  for 
him  whose  own  nation  was  without  sin  of  a  like  nature  to  cast 
the  first  stone.  Napoleon  might  not  have  been  assailed  so  viru- 
lently for  the  horrible  Jaffa  massacre. 

The  prisoners  were  marched  down  to  the  beach  and  shot. 
Some  leaped  into  the  sea  and  swam  for  their  lives  to  the  rocks 
which  make  the  harbour  of  Jaffa  famous — or  infamous — the 
fabled  rocks  to  which  the  virgin  Andromeda  was  chained. 
But  the  appetite  of  the  firing  squads  had  grown  by  what  it 
fed  on.  Not  to  be  cheated  of  their  full  measure  of  blood, 
they  rested  their  muskets  on  the  beach  and  by  making  an 
Oriental  sign  of  reconciliation  they  enticed  the  miserable 
fugitives  from  the  perils  of  the  foaming  sea,  to  shoot  them 
down  as  they  were  about  to  swim  ashore. 


96  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Jaffa  is  the  portal  of  the  Holy  Land.  Thousands  of  pil- 
grims every  year  jump  from  their  steamers  into  the  arms  of 
Arab  boatmen,  who  row  them  between  the  jagged  rocks  and 
land  them  on  the  shore  of  the  strange,  tumultuous  east.  The 
dragomans  of  the  town  are  overflowing  with  amazingly  minute 
information  about  the  exact  landing  place  in  this  ancient 
Joppa  of  the  cedar  of  Lebanon  which  the  King  of  Tyre  sent 
for  the  building  of  Solomon 's  temple ;  the  veritable  point  of  de- 
parture whence  Jonah,  fleeing  from  the  presence  of  God, 
sailed  hence  into  the  storm,  only  to  be  flung  overboard  to  the 
whale ;  the  precise  site  of  the  house  of  Simon  the  tanner, 
where  Peter  tarried  many  days,  and  the  tomb  of  Dorcas,  the 
woman  full  of  good  works  and  alms  deeds,  whom  the  apostle 
raised  from  the  dead. 

But  they  are  less  definite  and  voluble  about  the  more  re- 
cent ways  and  habitations  of  Napoleon.  After  holding  a  pro- 
longed conference  on  the  subject,  their  chief  spokesman  could 
offer  no  better  excuse  for  their  ignorance  than  by  saying: 
"You  see,  Napoleon  did  not  get  into  the  Bible."  And  of 
course,  that  was  his  fault,  not  theirs. 

The  fathers  of  the  Armenian  monastery,  however,  qualify 
in  profane  history  by  showing  the  very  cell  in  which  Napo- 
leon slept  while  he  made  their  monastic  home  his  own.  Their 
tall,  imposing  cavass,  or  "shooting  man,"  also  conducts  the 
curious  down  into  the  cavernous  and  pillared  place  which, 
after  Napoleon's  departure,  became  the  celebrated  pest  hos- 
pital of  Jaffa. 

From  Jaffa,  Napoleon  marched  up  over  the  Plain  of  Sharon, 
with  the  Mediterranean  on  the  one  hand  and  on  the  other, 
first  the  mountains  of  Judea  and  then  the  mountains  of  Sa- 
maria. He  passed  the  fallen  temples  of  Ceesarea,  rounded  the 
base  of  Mt.  Carmel  and  followed  the  beach  of  Haifa  to 
Acre. 

The  highway  that  to-day  leads  to  Acre,  to  Nablous,  to 
Nazareth,  and  to  Damascus,  rough  though  it  be,  is  one  of 
the  three  of  four  real  carriage  roads  of  Palestine.  The  good 
roads  movement  there  dates  only  from  the  pilgrimage  of  the 
German  Emperor  in  1S98,  when  the   Sultan   ordered  some 


INTO  THE  HOLY  LAND  97 

road  building  for  the  Kaiser's  convenience,  and  the  work  has 
been  continued  fitfully  for  the  benefit  of  the  tourists. 

The  natives  naturally  take  no  interest  in  the  subject,  for 
while  Judah  could  not  overwhelm  the  men  of  the  valley  and 
the  plain  because  they  had  chariots  of  iron,  few  chariots  have 
they  to-day,  these  men  of  the  valley  and  plain.  The  ass  and 
the  camel  and  the  immemorial  trails  and  paths  suffice  them. 
There  were  lately  only  two  automobiles  in  all  the  country, 
and  they  were  owned  by  foreigners. 

Haifa,  which  sits  at  the  foot  of  Mt.  Carmel  across  the 
Bay  of  Acre,  is  one  of  the  two  ports  of  the  Holy  Land  and  it 
is  a  terminus  of  one  of  the  two  railroads  of  Palestine,  that 
which  runs  up  from  the  ]\Iediterranean  to  Damascus. 

Like  Jaffa,  Haifa,  too,  is  receiving  the  stimulus  of  progress 
from  a  prosperous  German  religious  colony.  The  colonists 
live  by  themselves  in  modern  houses  and  broad,  shady  streets. 
To  step  from  their  leafy,  flowery  quarter  into  the  stony, 
squalid,  noisy  old  town  is  like  passing  in  a  minute  from 
Europe  to  Asia,  from  Christendom  to  Islam,  from  the  twen- 
tieth century  to  the  tenth. 

The  road  from  Haifa  to  Acre  probably  is  the  best  example 
of  road  building  in  the  Turkish  Empire.  Not  the  Sultan, 
however,  but  old  Neptune  was  its  builder.  It  lies  on  the 
hard  beach  which  borders  the  curving  bay  and  runs  through 
the  ford  across  the  brook  Kishon,  by  which  Elijah  slew  the 
prophets  of  Baal.  Over  the  shells  where  the  Phoenicians 
used  to  gather  the  materials  for  their  Tyrian  purple,  it  now 
plunges  into  the  little  stream  whose  waters  trickle  across  the 
sands  where,  according  to  Pliny,  glass  was  discovered,  and 
finally  it  comes  to  a  halt  before  the  gate  of  Acre. 

That  gate,  at  which  Napoleon  pounded  for  two  months  in 
the  spring  of  1799,  has,  through  all  recorded  time,  been  the 
tollgate  on  the  highway  between  Africa  and  Asia,  between 
Egypt  and  Constantinople,  between  the  Holy  Land  and 
Syria — and  blood  has  been  its  toll.  If  the  bones  of  the  mul- 
titude who  have  been  slain  at  that  cruel  portal  could  be  gath- 
ered in  a  heap.  Acre  would  sit  in  the  shadow  of  a  mountain 
of  dead. 


98  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

In  the  Crusades,  to  go  back  no  farther,  it  was  the  gate  to 
the  Holy  Land,  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  Crusaders  and 
Saracens  are  said  to  have  perished  before  it.  Behind  it  the 
hosts  of  the  cross  made  their  last  stand,  and  when  Acre  fell 
(St.  Jean  d'Acre  it  was  called),  the  Crusaders  lay  buried 
beneath  its  ruined  walls,  never  again  to  rise  and  battle  for 
the  rescue  of  the  Holy  Sepulchre. 

And  this  blood-drenched  threshold  of  Acre  is  the  "Gate  of 
Nazareth ! ' '  For  it  looks  out  upon  the  hills  where  only 
twenty  miles  away  dwelt  the  meek  and  forbearing  Nazarene 
who  taught  the  lesson  so  hard  for  men  to  learn :  ' '  Whosoever 
shall  smite  thee  on  thy  right  cheek,  turn  to  him  the  other 
also." 

It  had  been  500  years  and  more  since  an  army  from 
Christendom  had  presented  itself  before  the  gate  of  Acre 
when  Napoleon  came  to  challenge  this  stronghold  of  Turkish 
power.  Before  him  stretched  the  classic  highway  of  empire 
to  the  famous  ladder  of  Tyre,  leaning  against  a  white,  rocky 
promontory.  Behind  that  headland  lies  the  city  of  Hiram, 
whose  capture  is  counted  among  the  most  celebrated  ex- 
ploits of  Alexander  the  Great. 

Surely  this  new  Alexander  would  make  short  work  of  Acre, 
the  savage  den  of  a  Bosnian  slave  who  boasted  the  bloody  title 
of  Dejezzar,  which  means  ''the  butcher,"  "the  beheader," 
"the  cutthroat"  or  something  equally  terrible.  But  this 
barbarian  did  not  stand  alone  at  the  Acre  gate.  The  British 
lion  was  crouching  there  in  the  path  of  Napoleon. 

By  a  dramatic  combination  of  circumstances  which  the 
playwright  and  the  novelist  might  hesitate  to  employ  and 
which  makes  history  seem  theatrical.  Napoleon  found  stand- 
ing on  either  side  of  Dejezzar  two  men  who  had  crossed  his 
path  in  other  years  and  other  lands.  One  of  them  was  a 
daring  young  English  sailor  of  fortune  who,  after  serving 
with  Swedish  and  Turkish  fleets,  had  joined  the  British  navy 
and  was  at  Toulon  when  it  fell  under  the  fire  of  Napoleon's 
batteries.  It  was  he  who  stayed  behind  to  blow  up  the  mag- 
azines and  cheat  the  victors  of  their  spoils. 

In  a  later  daredevil  adventure  he  was  captured  as  a  sus- 


INTO  THE  HOLY  LAND  99 

pected  spy  and  confined  in  the  temple  at  Paris  for  two  years. 
After  appealing  in  vain  to  the  merabers  of  the  government 
to  be  exchanged  as  a  prisoner  of  war,  he  addressed  a  plea 
for  assistance  to  Napoleon  on  his  return  from  Italy,  but  re- 
ceived no  reply.  The  prisoner  in  the  temple  was  Sidney 
Smith. 

The  other  ally  of  Dejezzar  was  a  Frenchman  and  a  gradu- 
ate of  the  Ecole  Militaire  in  Paris.  He  and  Napoleon  were 
at  the  Ecole  together,  where  they  quarrelled  and  kicked  each 
other's  shins  black  and  blue  under  the  desks  in  the  classroom. 
This  was  Phelippeaux. 

Phelippeaux  was  an  aristocrat  and  an  enemy  of  the  Repub- 
lic. Being  in  Paris  and  ready  for  plots  he  aided  Smith  to 
escape  from  the  temple  just  one  week  to  a  day  before  Napo- 
leon's departure  for  Toulon  and  the  east.  They  fled  to  Eng- 
land, and  when  Smith  was  sent  to  Egypt  to  watch  and  thwart 
Napoleon,  Phelippeaux  eagerly  joined  him  in  the  expedition 
against  his  old  schoolroom  foe. 

While  the  army  was  slowly  labouring  across  the  desert, 
Smith,  racing  on  ahead  with  his  little  fleet,  pounced  upon  the 
French  flotilla,  having  on  board  the  siege  train  and  ammuni- 
tion. Napoleon,  thus  left  without  the  necessaiy  means  of 
besieging  the  town,  saw  his  own  guns  mounted  on  the  walls 
by  Phelippeaux  and  turned  against  him. 

Forty  times  in  two  months  he  hurled  his  little  force  in 
vain  against  the  gate  of  Acre  under  the  fire  from  the  town, 
and  often  under  another  stream  of  fire  from  the  British  ships. 
In  the  midst  of  the  siege  an  army  of  Turks  from  Damascus, 
boasting  themselves  innumerable  as  the  sands  of  the  sea  or  as 
the  stars  of  heaven,  bore  down  upon  the  French  rear. 

To  meet  the  Turks  and  British  in  front  and  beat  off  the 
Turks  that  were  swarming  behind  him.  Napoleon  had  now  an 
army  of  only  9000  men.  If  caught  between  the  two  forces, 
his  little  band  would  certainly  be  smashed  to  pieces.  To 
avert  that  catastrophe,  he  determined  to  divide  his  forces, 
hasten  into  the  mountains  of  Galilee  and  there  challenge  the 
horde  from  Damascus  on  its  march  to  the  relief  of  Acre. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

HIS  FIRST  RETREAT 

1799     AGE  29-30 

WHEN  Napoleon  marched  into  the  mountains  of  Gal- 
ilee, in  the  month  of  April,  1799,  to  stem  the  tide  of 
Turks  pouring  down  upon  him  from  Damascus,  he 
matched  4000  men  against  30,000.  For  he  dared  take  no 
larger  number  from  the  siege  of  Acre,  where  Turkish  troops 
and  British  ships  were  holding  the  town  against  him. 

The  first  shock  of  battle  reverberated  about  the  traditional 
Mount  of  the  Beatitudes,  the  Horns  of  Hattin,  where  General 
Junot,  with  only  300  men  in  a  square  withstood  an  advancing 
column  of  4000  Turkish  horsemen.  Next  Kleber's  infantry- 
met  and  repelled  a  large  body  of  cavalry  at  Cana,  where  a 
Greek  priest  shows  the  stone  jars  in  which  the  water  was 
turned  into  wine  for  the  wedding  feast. 

The  Turks  were  bursting  into  the  valley  of  the  Jordan  when 
Napoleon  himself  struck  out  along  the  bridle  path  that  leads 
from  Acre  up  into  Nazareth,  where,  seeing  the  smoke  of 
battle  curling  about  the  heights  of  the  town,  he  spurred  his 
horse  to  the  scene  of  combat.  Descending  between  Mt.  Tabor 
and  the  Mountain  of  the  Precipitation,  down  the  cliff  of 
which  the  unbelieving  Nazarenes  threatened  to  east  the 
prophet  who  was  not  without  honour  save  among  his  own 
people,  he  looked  out  upon  the  historic  Plain  of  Esdraelon  or 
Jezreel. 

There,  the  young  champion  of  the  west,  fresh  from  his  vic- 
tory in  the  cockpit  of  Europe  entered  the  lists  in  this  cock- 
pit of  Asia.  Lifting  his  glass,  his  eye  swept  the  field  of 
strife.  In  the  west  rose  Mt.  Carmel  by  the  sea,  and  to  the 
south  the  hills  of  Samaria.  Over  to  the  east,  where  the  moun- 
tains of  Gilead  come  down  to  the  River  Jordan,  the  Mos- 

100 


HIS  FIRST  RETREAT  101 

lem  enemy  was  encamped  in  a  black  mass  of  camel's  hair 
tents. 

At  the  foot  of  Tabor,  General  Kleber,  with  no  hope  or 
thought  that  the  General-in-chief  was  coming  to  his  rescue, 
was  stubbornly  holding  back  a  big  horde  of  mounted  men  as 
they  advanced  from  their  camp  and  furiously  strove  to 
crush  his  little  force  against  the  base  of  the  mountain. 
The  Turkish  dead  lay  in  windrows  all  about  him. 

For  hours  Kleber  had  been  battling  with  despair.  He 
wished  only  to  break  through  the  Turkish  lines  or  at  least  see 
his  brave  but  exhausted  band  die  like  soldiers  rather  than  be 
butchered  like  sheep.     Soon  he  must  fire  his  last  cartridge. 

With  an  instant  grasp  of  the  desperate  situation,  Napoleon 
sent  his  small  body  of  cavalry  across  the  plain  through  fields 
of  wheat  six  feet  high,  which  screened  them  from  the  Turks. 
The  cavalrymen  gave  the  enemy  a  wide  berth  until  they  were 
in  his  rear,  when  they  closed  in  to  cut  him  off  from  his  camp 
and  his  line  of  retreat  over  the  Jordan.  As  the  Turks  in  their 
surprise  and  bewilderment  discovered  these  French  horse- 
men behind  them  they  turned  from  Kleber. 

That  was  the  moment  for  Napoleon  to  deliver  his  second 
stroke.  Leading  in  person  a  force  of  infantry  within  a  gun- 
shot of  the  Turkish  line,  their  fire  suddenly  burst  upon  the 
foe  from  the  field  of  grain.  At  the  sight  of  Napoleon  emerg- 
ing from  the  wheat,  Kleber 's  hard-pressed  and  despairing 
band  made  the  Galilean  hills  ring  with  cheers. 

Finding  the  French  springing  upon  them  from  every  di- 
rection as  if  they  were  a  multitude,  and  finding  themselves 
in  the  centre  of  a  triangle,  the  30,000  Turks  broke  in  mad 
disorder.  They  fled  to  the  Jordan,  scampered  off  toward  the 
Sea  of  Galilee  or  hid  in  the  hills,  leaving  behind  them  400 
camels,  scores  of  horses,  many  guns,  abundant  ammunition 
and  food  enough  to  last  the  French  a  year. 

Mt.  Tabor  is  the  most  historic  among  all  Napoleon's  ex- 
traordinary battlefields.  That  plain  of  Esdraelon  has  been 
the  prize  ring  of  the  nations  of  the  east  through  5000  years 
that  are  told,  and  we  know '  not  how  much  longer  through 
ages  untold. 


102    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  smoke  of  the  locomotive  now  rises  close  beneath  the 
hills  of  Nazareth  as  a  train  from  Damascus  enters  the  plain 
on  its  way  to  Haifa.  And  the  trains  of  antiquity,  the  camel 
trains,  ignoring  the  new  highway  of  iron,  course  tediously 
along  the  old  caravan  route,  by  which  the  children  of  the 
east  poured  down  upon  the  children  of  Israel. 

A  clump  of  trees,  in  the  shadow  of  Mt.  Gilboa,  marks  the 
still  flomng  fountain,  where,  rallying  to  Gideon's  trumpet 
call,  the  invincible  300  qualified  as  war  dogs  by  lapping  up 
the  water,  dog  fashion  with  their  tongues,  and  overwhelmed 
the  Midianites  and  Amalekites  although  they  came  as  grass- 
hoppers for  multitude.  Farther  on  are  the  huts  of  Zerin, 
the  once  royal  city  of  Jezreel,  where  from  the  window  of  her 
ivory  palace.  Queen  Jezebel,  that  byword  among  women, 
looked  out  with  hard,  covetous  eyes  upon  Naboth's  vineyard 
over  where  Mt.  Gilboa  still  shows  the  wine  presses  cut  in  its 
rocky  side.  Again  she  looked  with  terror  to  see  the  venge- 
ful Jehu  in  his  chariot  furiously  rushing  down  from  the 
mountains  of  Gilead  to  deliver  her  to  the  devouring  dogs. 

There  in  the  plain  lies  the  first  battlefield  of  David.  Close 
by,  the  sun  is  baking  the  wretched  hovels  where  the  witch 
of  Endor  told  Saul's  tragic  fortune,  while  toward  the  south 
rise  the  hills  where  Jonathan  was  laid  low  by  the  Philis- 
tines, and  Saul  fell  on  his  sword,  moving  David  to  exclaim, 
' '  How  are  the  mighty  fallen ! ' ' 

From  the  summit  of  Mt.  Tabor,  above  the  spot  where  Kle- 
ber  was  beset  with  his  back  to  the  mountain  wall,  Deborah 
saw  the  stars  in  their  courses  fighting  against  Sisera  and  his 
900  iron  chariots,  and  sang  her  song  of  cruel  victory.  It  was 
there  on  that  plain,  in  that  coliseum  of  gladiatorial  combats, 
that  stadium  where  through  uncounted  generations  humanity 
has  been  the  football,  that  the  last  pitched  battle  of  the  Cru- 
sades was  fought.  There,  too,  the  last  battle  of  all,  the  finish 
fight  between  the  hosts  of  good  and  evil,  is  to  be  fought,  for 
part  of  the  plain  is  "the  place  which  is  called  in  the  Jewish 
tongue  Armageddon,"  that  is  the  "Valley  of  the  Megiddo." 

The  village  of  Nain,  a  welcome  oasis  for  the  soul  in  the 
midst  of  all  that  waste  of  war,  squats  near  the  foot  of  Mt. 


HIS  FIRST  RETREAT  103 

Tabor.  At  the  sight  of  that  poor  little  hamlet,  the  mind 
turns  gladly  from  scenes  that  speak  of  200  generations  of 
slaughter,  from  hate  to  love,  from  the  taking  of  life  to  the 
giving  of  life ;  for  there  in  the  gates  of  Nain,  Jesus  restored 
the  widow's  son  and  dried  the  widow's  tears. 

As  one  enters  the  vale  of  Nazareth  from  the  war  trodden 
plain,  the  message  of  peace  which  the  little  town  sends  out 
into  a  warring  world  holds  a  new  and  clearer  meaning, 
Nazareth  itself  lies  in  a  pretty  mountain  ravine,  with  schools 
and  orphanages  and  hospitals,  the  gifts  of  the  Christian 
world  to  the  boyhood  village  of  Jesus,  looking  fondly  down 
upon  it  from  the  surrounding  heights. 

At  the  Virgin's  Fountain,  the  only  water  supply  in  the 
town  now  as  in  the  olden  time,  the  beauty  of  the  girls  and 
young  mothers,  who  come  to  fill  their  water  jugs  even  as 
Mary  must  have  come,  is  really  striking.  To  that  fountain 
Napoleon  went  after  the  battle  of  Mt.  Tabor,  and  there  he 
received  the  homage  of  the  people. 

In  the  monastery  of  the  Annunciation  he  slept,  where,  tra- 
ditionally, stood  the  home  of  the  Holy  Family — where  "the 
Word  was  made  flesh."  There  the  visitor  is  conducted  in  a 
cavernous  region  to  the  marble  slab,  worn  smooth  by  pious 
lips,  where  the  angel  paused  before  Mary,  and  on  to  the 
* '  kitchen  of  the  Virgin. ' '  The  fathers  of  the  monastery  have 
treasured  through  the  century  the  bed  and  room  where  the 
young  warrior  rested,  amid  the  scenes  hallowed  by  the  youth 
of  the  Prince  of  Peace,  whose  sword  was  of  the  spirit  and 
whose  kingdom  was  not  of  this  world. 

When  Napoleon  returned  to  the  gate  of  Acre  he  brought 
to  his  besieging  forces  the  news  of  victory  to  cheer  them  in 
their  forlorn  hope.  But  the  sun  of  a  Syrian  summer  was 
beating  upon  them  in  the  unshaded  plain  with  a  fire  more 
destructive  than  that  which  belched  from  the  walls  and  the 
ships.  Phelippeaux  succumbed  to  its  burning  rays,  strug- 
gling to  the  last  to  settle  the  old  score  with  his  schoolmate 
at  the  Ecole  of  Paris.  The  unburied  dead  lay  in  a  heap 
against  the  stubborn  wall,  threatening  the  health  of  the  forces 
on  both  sides. 


104     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

One  day  in  early  ]May  when  Napoleon  saw  a  fleet  of  thirty 
sail  bearing  down  upon  Acre  with  thousands  of  Turkish 
soldiers  coming  to  the  relief  of  the  town,  the  siege  took  on  a 
spirit  of  desperation.  In  a  la^t  effort  to  capture  the  place 
before  the  reinforcements  arrived,  the  French  flung  them- 
selves madly  at  the  w^alls,  and  with  scaling  ladders  carried  the 
tricolour  flag  to  one  of  the  towers. 

At  an  exposed  and  vital  position  three  officers  were  killed 
in  quick  succession.  Another  must  go  into  the  deadly  breech. 
But  Napoleon  had  only  two  aides  left,  Lavelette  and  Eugene 
Beauharnais.  Eugene  was  filled  with  reckless  daring,  but  his 
stepfather  had  seen  him  fall  once  when  stunned  by  a  shell. 
Turning  to  Lavelette,  he  said:  "I  don't  want  to  send  this 
boy  and  have  him  killed  so  young.  His  mother  has  entrusted 
him  to  me.     You  know  what  life  is.     Go ! " 

The  sun  was  setting  on  the  red  day,  when  the  Turkish  re- 
inforcements were  seen  rowing  ashore  in  their  small  boats. 
The  siege  had  come  to  its  last  stage  and  several  hundred 
French  broke  into  the  town  where  they  fought  their  way  to 
the  garden  of  Dejezzar.  There  they  looked  upon  the  walls 
of  "the  Butcher's"  harem,  the  prison  house  of  his  eighteen 
white  wives ;  but  in  a  few  minutes  the  brave  men  in  the  gar- 
den were  headless  corpses. 

This  wild  charge  was  led  by  General  Lannes,  who  was 
brought  to  the  earth  by  a  shot  through  his  neck.  A  company 
of  his  soldiers  bore  him  back  to  safety,  but  with  a  wound  that 
caused  him  to  carry  his  head  to  one  side  the  rest  of  his  days. 

For  twenty-five  hours  the  fighting  lasted.  In  the  last  at- 
tack, when  the  spearheads  on  the  standards  of  France  and 
Turkey  were  locked,  Napoleon  stood  with  Arrighi  by  his  side 
until  a  shell  swept  do\^Ti  his  fellow  Corsican.  With  anxious 
eyes  he  was  watching  Kleber's  great  shock  of  bushy  hair  in 
the  thick  of  the  hand-to-hand  combat,  and  listening  to  his 
tremendous  voice  as  it  rose  above  the  barbarous  yells  of  a 
thousand  newly  landed  janissaries. 

Soon  Napoleon  saw  Kleber  stop.  The  French  column 
ceased  to  move  forward.  It  paused  a  moment,  and  then  re- 
coiled in  a  wild  rout  before  the  victorious  Turks. 


HIS  FIRST  RETREAT  105 

The  new  Alexander  had  lost  the  empire  of  the  east.  A 
little  town,  "that  miserable  mudhole,"  as  he  called  it,  had 
barred  Napoleon's  path  to  the  conquest  of  the  Orient.  All 
his  life  he  murmured,  "I  missed  my  fortune  at  St.  Jean 
d  'Acre ' ' — * '  the  grain  of  sand  that  undid  me. ' ' 

Folding  his  tent  like  the  Arab  he  silently  stole  away  in 
the  night.  But  a  messenger  from  the  exultant  Sidney  Smith 
overtook  him  with  this  taunting  letter:  "Could  you  have 
thought  that  the  poor  prisoner  in  the  temple,  an  unfortu- 
nate for  whom  you  refused  even  for  a  moment  to  give  your- 
self any  concern,  would  compel  you  in  the  midst  of  the  sand 
of  Syria  to  raise  the  siege  of  a  miserable,  almost  defenceless, 
town?"  At  the  same  time  the  British  sailor  was  boasting 
in  his  report  to  London  that  "the  plain  of  Nazareth  is  the 
boundary  of  Bonaparte's  extraordinary  career." 

Entering  the  ironclad  Gate  of  Nazareth  through  the  double 
walls  of  the  town  of  Acre,  one  encounters,  to-day,  nothing 
more  warlike  than  a  drove  of  camels  with  a  few  begging  lepers 
and  cripples  in  the  vestibule  of  the  town.  The  way  to  the 
ramparts  is  through  a  maze  of  stone  and  through  narrow, 
twisted,  vaulted,  but  surprisingly  clean,  old  streets,  bazar 
lined. 

Looking  seaward  from  the  ramparts  not  a  ship  is  to  be  seen 
in  port.  For  when  the  Moslems  in  their  fanatical  frenz}'- 
tore  down  the  great  city  of  the  Crusaders  they  filled  the  an- 
cient harbour  with  the  ruins,  and  now  Haifa  has  aU  the  com- 
merce of  the  region. 

Acre  is  only  a  petrified  town,  with  a  population  perhaps 
of  12,000,  all  fast  asleep,  but  still  talking  a  good  deal  in 
their  sleep.  Down  at  a  corner  of  the  wall  rises  the  light- 
house on  the  foundations  of  the  Philistine  temple  of  Beelze- 
bub. On  the  opposite  wall  the  Tour  INIaudite  was  built  with 
Judas'  thirty  pieces  of  silver!  But  Dejezzar's  tower  is  the 
loftiest  of  all  in  Acre.  It  is  the  minaret  of  the  mosque  which 
that  pious  old  butcher  reared  to  Allah  on  lines  of  his  own 
designing,  and  it  must  in  fairness  be  admitted  that  he  was  as 
clever  an  architect  as  ever  cut  a  throat. 

There  is  to  be  seen  from  the  roof  of  the  monastery  of  the 


106  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Franciscan  fathers,  a  pretty  panorama — including  the  Mount 
of  Richard  Cceur  de  Lion  and  Napoleon's  headquarters  out 
in  Dejezzar's  country  villa.  In  a  monastery  of  the  Greek 
faith  is  a  rare  monument  of  the  Napoleonic  siege.  It  is  a 
memorial  tablet  to  that  Major  Oldfield  of  the  British  marines, 
whose  daring  charges  in  the  sorties  against  the  French  moved 
Napoleon  to  admiration  and  at  last  to  bury  him  with  full  mili- 
tary honours,  as  the  inscription  duly  records. 

There  are  few  Christians  in  Acre  and  it  is  said  that  even 
these  do  not  venture  to  show  themselves  in  the  streets  at  the 
season  of  Ramadan.  Tourists  are  a  rarity,  there  being  no 
hotel  and  nothing  but  a  vast,  cheerless  eastern  caravansary, 
a  khan. 

But  the  Sultan  has  a  large  and  crowded  boarding  house  at 
Acre  for  the  special  accommodation  of  those  who  disturb  the 
repose  of  the  Sublime  Porte.  This  is  a  stockade  rather  than 
a  prison,  and  behind  it  may  be  seen  an  array  of  picturesque 
conspirators  as  terrible  looking  as  any  operatic  stage  ever 
presents. 

Far  up  the  side  of  ]\It.  Carmel,  at  the  other  side  of  the 
bay  of  Acre,  is  the  big  Carmelite  monastery  which  served  Na- 
poleon as  a  military  hospital.  When  he  retreated,  he  left 
under  guard  at  the  monastery  all  who  were  too  sick  to  accom- 
pany his  army  on  its  long,  hard  march.  According  to  a 
local  legend,  these  numbered  2000  and  all  were  massacred  by 
Dejezzar.  But  by  the  records  of  history  only  a  few  soldiers 
really  were  left  there. 

The  Carmelites  to-day  are  a  little  Christian  garrison  in  the 
land  of  Islam.  In  the  course  of  the  centuries,  they  have  seen 
their  home  destroyed  seven  or  eight  times  by  the  foes  of  the 
cross.  The  silent,  cloistered  precincts,  tenanted  now  by  only 
twenty-one  monks,  seem  like  the  deserted  halls  of  a  big  sum- 
mer hotel  out  of  season.  The  monastery  was  long  closed  to 
the  monks  after  Napoleon's  retreat.  When  more  than  thirty 
years  after  the  slaughter  of  the  helpless,  they  were  permitted 
to  return,  they  gathered  and  deposited  in  a  cave,  the  bones  of 
the  dead.  Afterward  the  remains  of  the  poor  boys  of  France 
found  their  last  resting  place  in  the  pretty  garden  before  the 


HIS  FIRST  RETREAT  107 

monastery,  and  the  sailors  of  a  passing  French  warship 
erected  a  memorial  stone  with  an  iron  cross  among  the  palms 
in  "the  vineyard  of  God." 

Napoleon's  400-mile  retreat  from  Acre  down  the  Syrian 
coast,  across  the  plains  of  Palestine  and  the  desert  of  El  Tih, 
in  a  tropic  summer,  was  an  anticipation  in  miniature  of  the 
retreat  from  Moscow.  It  was  the  last  time  he  was  destined 
to  turn  his  back  to  an  enemy  until  his  flight  over  another 
desert,  a  desert  of  snow  in  a  Russian  winter !  In  that  first 
retreat  he  lost  the  empire  of  the  east,  in  the  second  he  was 
to  lose  the  empire  of  the  west. 

On  his  return  march  to  Egypt  he  ordered  all  the  horses  to 
be  given  over  to  the  sick  and  wounded.  A  stricken  grenadier 
hesitated  lest  he  might  soil  a  handsome  saddle,  but  the  Gen- 
eral-in-chief  said,  "Mount!  There  is  nothing  too  good  for  a 
brave  soldier."  An  ordnance  man  inquiring  which  horse 
the  commander  wished  to  reserve  for  himself.  Napoleon  re- 
plied with  a  blow  from  his  whip,  "Every  one  afoot;  myself 
first  of  all." 

The  fields  were  fired  to  cut  off  pursuers,  but  a  few  Syrians 
and  the  Arabs  of  Samaria  lurking  behind  the  stones  and 
bushes  on  the  hillsides  peppered  the  fleeing  French.  Stung 
by  that  bushwhacking  to  an  exasperated  and  mutinous  tem- 
per, some  soldiers  forgot  the  obligations  of  humanity  toward 
their  sick  and  helpless  comrades,  and  angry  murmurs  arose 
against  them  for  delaying  the  retreat. 

Arrived  at  Jaffa,  many  of  the  garrison  that  Napoleon  had 
left  there  in  his  advance  on  Acre  were  found  in  the  hospital, 
some  with  "the  plague."  Those  who  were  not  plague- 
stricken  were  panic-stricken  in  the  presence  of  the  hideous 
malady.  To  arouse  them  from  their  despair.  Napoleon  went 
among  them  and  there  is  a  disputed  story  of  his  touching  a 
plague  patient  to  inspire  the  courage  of  the  terrified  inmates 
of  the  hospital. 

"  In  a  few  hours  the  Turks  will  be  here, ' '  he  repeated  to  the 
unfortunates  as  he  moved  along.  "Let  all  those  who  have 
the  strength  rise  and  come  with  us.  They  shall  be  carried  on 
litters  and  horses."     All  but   about  fifty,   perhaps  all   but 


108  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

twenty-five,  strug'o;led  up  and  swelled  the  numbers  of  the 
helpless  that  were  already  burdening  the  retreating  column. 

Napoleon  was  charged  for  a  long  time  with  having  adopted 
the  principle  of  euthanasia  toward  those  who  were  too  feeble 
to  rise  from  their  beds  and  accompany  him,  and  of  having 
directed  the  apothecary  to  administer  to  them  a  fatal  dose  of 
laudanum.  Bourrienne  says  he  did,  but  Marmont,  Andre- 
ossi,  and  other  witnesses  testify  that  he  did  not.  Sidney 
Smith  himself  tells  of  finding  the  French  sick  still  alive  three 
days  after  the  army  left  Jaffa.  The  weight  of  judgment  now 
is  that  Napoleon  restrained  the  instinctive  promptings  of 
nature,  and,  observing  the  scruples  of  our  civilisation,  did 
nothing  to  hasten  the  end  of  that  little  band  of  soldiers,  but 
left  them  to  the  tortures  of  their  disease  and  the  tortures  of 
their  fears  in  the  pest  hospital  at  Jaffa. 

For  nine  hot  summer  days  the  army  carried  its  sick  and 
wounded  over  the  desert  into  Egypt.  The  mirage,  that 
cruel  trick  of  nature,  lured  the  soldiers  to  cooling  waters  that 
vanished  at  their  approach.  Maddened  by  heat  and  thirst, 
some  threw  down  the  litters  of  the  sick,  and  killed  themselves 
before  the  eyes  of  Napoleon. 

Yet,  with  flags  flying  and  bands  playing,  the  sadly  reduced 
Army  of  Syria,  as  if  in  triumph,  entered  the  Bab  el  Nasir, 
"the  gate  of  victory,"  at  Cairo.  "I  have  razed  the  palace  of 
Dejezzar  and  the  ramparts  of  Acre,"  Napoleon  proclaimed 
to  the  Egyptians;  "not  a  stone  remains  upon  another." 
Bourrienne  looked  up  in  amazement  as  his  chief  dictated  that 
bulletin,  but  only  to  be  chided  for  his  ingenuousness:  "My 
dear  fellow,  you  are  a  simpleton.  You  do  not  understand 
this  business." 

In  a  month  the  pursuing  Turks  were  upon  him  to  challenge 
even  his  refuge  in  Egypt  from  the  disaster  in  Syria.  A 
British  fleet  protected  the  landing  of  a  large  Turkish  army 
on  the  sandy  promontory  of  Aboukir  where  the  French,  by  a 
rapid  movement,  caught  them  and  penned  them  up.  Of  the 
15,000  Turks  who  entered  the  battle  there,  9000  are  said  to 
have  found  their  graves  in  the  sands  or  in  the  waters.     Abou- 


HIS  FIRST  RETREAT  109 

kir  had  avenged  Acre,  and  the  victory  served  to  eclipse  the 
retreat  from  Syria. 

While  making  some  arrangements  with  Sidney  Smith  un- 
der a  flag  of  truce  after  the  battle,  Napoleon  sent  him  a  chest 
of  coffee  and  a  case  of  brandy.  In  return  for  these  gifts, 
Smith  sent  him  a  batch  of  European  newspapers,  only  six 
weeks  old.  "Heavens,"  Napoleon  exclaimed,  as  he  read  one 
of  the  papers,  "the  fools  have  lost  Italy.  All  the  fruits  of 
our  victories  are  gone.     I  must  leave  Egypt." 

The  truth  is  he  had  wished  to  leave  ever  since  he  came. 
From  the  day  Nelson  sank  the  French  fleet  he  had  been  no 
more  than  a  prisoner  in  a  desert.  The  bad  news  from  home 
only  determined  him  to  hasten  his  long  meditated  attempt  to 
make  a  wild  dash  to  France  and  to  his  destiny. 

Fooling  Smith  and  his  scouts,  he  stole  aboard  a  vessel  in 
the  night  as  she  lay  off  a  lonely  desert  shore.  With  500  men 
and  a  few  pieces  of  artillery  on  four  frigates,  and  with  less 
than  $3500  in  his  chest,  he  set  sail.  The  Army  of  Egypt  was 
left  under  the  command  of  Kleber  and  abandoned  to  its  in- 
evitable doom. 

Since  Napoleon  could  not  be  an  Alexander  in  the  east  he 
might  yet  be  a  Charlemagne  in  the  west — if  fortune  did  not  be- 
tray him  as  he  dodged  through  a  British  blockade  of  the 
Mediterranean  so  close  that  a  letter  seldom  passed.  For  six 
weeks  he  was  the  sport  of  the  winds  and  was  fairly  blown 
into  the  harbour  of  Ajaccio.  But  Ajaccio  was  no  longer  the 
port  of  his  dreams  and  his  ambitions.  At  the  first  favouring 
breeze  he  sailed  away,  never  again  to  smell  the  scented  fields 
of  his  youth  or  look  on  his  native  mountains. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
RULER  OF  TRANCE 

1799-1800     AGE   30 

THE  people  of  the  pretty  little  port  of  Frejus  on  the 
Mediterranean  Riviera,  sixty  miles  east  of  Toulon, 
awoke  of  an  October  morning  in  the  year  1799  to  the 
astonishing  news  that  Napoleon  was  entering  their  harbour. 
All  France  supposed  him  to  be  penned  up  in  Egypt.  But  he 
had  made  a  safe  run  of  nearly  fifty  days  through  the  British 
blockade.  "Had  he  fallen  from  heaven,"  Savary  tells  us, 
"his  appearance  would  not  have  created  more  surprise  and 
enthusiasm." 

Napoleon  himself  did  not  dream  of  the  frenzied  welcome 
that  awaited  him.  On  the  contrary,  he  was  fearful  of  a  long 
detention  in  quarantine.  "When  the  townspeople,  frantic  with 
joy,  swarmed  out  in  boats  and  surrounded  his  ship,  his  com- 
panions shouted  a  warning  to  keep  at  a  safe  distance  as  the 
vessel  had  come  from  the  plague-infected  Orient.  But  the 
people  roared,  "We  prefer  the  plague  to  the  Austrians." 
For  while  Napoleon  had  been  absent,  the  conquering  soldiers 
of  Austria  had  obliterated  his  victories  in  Italy,  and  the  in- 
habitants of  southern  France  were  in  terror  of  an  invasion  by 
the  white  coats. 

As  with  the  population  of  Frejus,  so  it  was  with  the  French 
people  as  a  whole.  They  preferred  any  evils  Napoleon  might 
bring  to  the  evils  already  upon  them.  His  journey  from 
Frejus  was  a  triumphant  progress.  Everywhere  along  his 
drive  of  600  miles  Napoleon  was  hailed  as  the  rescuer  of  the 
Republic. 

Every  town  through  which  he  passed  gave  him  an  enthusi- 

110 


RULER  OF  FRANCE  111 

astic  reception,  but  none,  we  may  be  snre,  touched  the  same 
emotions  as  Valence  when  she  welcomed  back  the  melancholy, 
almost  suicidal  sub  lieutenant,  who  only  a  few  years  before 
had  haunted  her  lanes  and  garrets.  At  the  gate  of  the  town 
he  was  greeted  by  Mile.  Bou,  and  her  former  lodger  gave 
her  an  Indian  shawl  and  a  silver  compass.  For  this  favourite 
of  fortune  ever  retained  at  least  one  simple  quality,  a  recol- 
lection of  all  who  touched  his  life  in  its  plainer  days  and 
a  desire  to  draw  them  after  him  as  he  sped  up  the  heights 
of  fame. 

Napoleon  had  hastened  from  Egypt  with  an  ambition  to  be 
the  saviour  of  the  country  from  military  disasters  in  Italy. 
He  really  had  no  idea  that  the  time  had  already  come  for 
him  to  take  his  place  in  France,  no  idea  that  already  "the 
pear  was  ripe,"  as  he  had  been  in  the  habit  of  saying  while 
musing  on  the  future.  But  he  found  he  had  now  only  to 
shake  the  tree  to  bring  down  the  fruit. 

France  was  not  fearing  foreign  armies  so  much  as  the 
plotting  factions  at  home,  who  forever  kept  the  country  be- 
tween the  two  horns  of  the  dilemma,  the  return  of  the  Bour- 
bons or  the  return  of  the  Terror.  The  day  Napoleon  arrived 
in  Paris  nearly  every  plotter  began  an  attempt  to  draw  him 
into  his  own  particular  plot.  He  did  not  have  to  conspire. 
He  had  only  to  choose  among  the  conspiracies  already  hatched 
before  he  landed  on  the  shore  of  France. 

In  the  end  he  selected  the  Sieyes  brand  of  revolution. 
This  former  cleric  was  a  member  of  the  Directory  of  five 
members,  which  held  the  executive  power,  while  the  council 
of  ancients  and  the  council  of  the  five  hundred  formed  the 
upper  and  lower  houses  of  the  legislative  body.  The  Sieyes 
plot  called  for  the  assembling  of  those  two  houses  in  an  ex- 
traordinary session  at  an  early  hour  in  the  morning,  before 
the  city  should  be  astir.  The  ancients,  whose  leaders  were 
favourable  to  a  change,  were  to  declare  that  Paris  was  in  dan- 
ger of  a  Terrorist  uprising,  appoint  Napoleon  to  the  com- 
mand of  the  military  forces  for  the  protection  of  the  capital 
and  adjourn  the  legislative  sessions  to  the  quiet  and  security 
of  St.  Cloud. 


112  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

In  the  midst  of  the  panic  thns  fomented  Sieyes  and  a  fel- 
low-conspirator in  the  Directory  were  to  resign  and  the  re- 
maining directors  were  to  be  frightened  into  retiring,  while 
the  legislature  at  St.  Cloud  was  to  be  hastened  into  establish- 
ing a  new  government  with  a  new  constitution.  Sieyes  pro- 
posed to  handle  the  politicians  and  leave  to  Napoleon  the 
control  of  the  army  officers,  who  naturally  rallied  around 
him  in  unquestioning  loyalty  when  they  saw  him  preparing 
to  act. 

Like  everything  with  which  Napoleon  had  to  do,  the  revo- 
lution moved  according  to  a  nicely  arranged  schedule.  All 
his  trusted  companions  in  arms  gathered  at  his  house  in  the 
Eue  de  la  Victoire  at  six  o'clock  on  a  November  morning, 
when  the  general  in  command  of  the  city,  a  most  vital  per- 
sonage, burst  in  with  a  demand  to  be  informed  what  it  was 
all  about.  This  was  Lefebre,  the  husband  of  the  former 
laundress,  the  Mme.  Sans  Gene  of  the  stage  and  the  novel. 
That  ex-sergeant  was  too  hot-headed  a  republican  to  have 
been  approached  in  cold  blood  and  told  the  secret  in  advance. 

"Lefebre,"  cried  Napoleon,  "you,  one  of  the  pillars  of  the 
Republic,  will  you  leave  it  to  perish  at  the  hands  of  the  law- 
yers? Here  is  the  sword  I  wore  at  the  Pyramids;  I  give  it 
to  you  as  a  pledge  of  my  confidence." 

* '  Let  us  throw  the  lawyers  into  the  river, ' '  roared  the  fierce 
republican  as  he  fondled  his  new  toy. 

The  subtle  Sieyes  now  sent  word  that  he  had  played  his 
part  with  the  ancients,  whereupon  Napoleon  galloped  to  the 
Tuileries  and  took  command.  Once  more  Paris  stood  in  the 
presence  of  the  "man  on  horseback." 

In  accordance  with  the  plans,  the  legislative  bodies  met 
the  next  morning  out  at  St.  Cloud  in  the  suburban  palace 
of  the  old  kings,  where  Napoleon  anxiously  waited  in  a  near-by 
apartment  for  the  schedule  of  the  revolution  to  be  observed. 
With  the  slow  hours  of  delay,  he  grew  increasingly  impatient 
and  angry.  It  was  his  first  experience  with  a  legislative 
body  that  pretended  to  any  independence  of  his  own  will. 

Fairly  beside  himself  at  last,  he  rushed  into  the  council 
of  the  five  hundred.     This  body  was  not  in  the  plot  and  the 


RULER  OF  FRANCE  113 

sight  of  the  soldiers  accompanying  the  young  general  in- 
furiated the  red-gowned  council.  Nor  would  it  be  stilled  by 
its  president,  Lucien  Bonaparte,  who,  as  a  compliment  to  his 
brother,  had  been  elected  to  the  chair. 

Councillors  rushed  upon  Napoleon  and  grabbing  the  in- 
vader of  their  sanctuary  by  the  collar  of  his  grey  coat  and 
denouncing  him  as  a  traitor  and  dictator,  they  shook  him  as 
a  dog  shakes  a  rat.  Although  history  doubts  if  any  weapon 
was  drawn  on  him,  Napoleon  cried  in  the  midst  of  the  noisy 
melee:  "They  mean  to  assassinate  me."  Thereupon  the 
god  of  war  fell  like  a  fainting  woman  into  the  arms  of  his 
grenadiers. 

' '  Outlaw  him !  Outlaw  him ! ' '  The  council  hall  resounded 
with  that  sinister  cry,  which  had  sent  many  a  man  to  the 
guillotine,  ' '  Hors  la  loi !     Hors  la  loi ! " 

Napoleon  gathered  his  wits  as  he  determined  no  longer 
to  waste  his  time  in  words  but  to  return  to  his  native 
element.  The  grenadiers  under  Murat  and  Leclerc  were  or- 
dered to  clear  the  hall  of  the  five  hundred.  Forward! 
March !  The  drums  rolled  as  the  soldiers  entered.  And  the 
councillors,  crying  "Vive  la  Republique,"  jumped  out  the 
windows. 

The  Republic  was  no  more ;  it  had  jumped  out  the  window. 

With  a  mere  fragment  of  the  broken  up  five  hundred,  only 
thirty  members,  Lucien  opened  a  new  session  at  nine  o'clock  in 
the  evening.  Measures  were  quickly  concerted  with  the 
complaisant  ancients,  whereby  the  old  government  was 
formally  done  to  death  and  a  provisional  Consulate  of  the 
three  conspirators,  Sieyes,  Ducos  and  Bonaparte,  was  estab- 
lished. 

The  scene  of  that  memorable  but  bloodless  revolution  re- 
mains one  of  the  favoured  sights  of  the  environs  of  Paris. 
The  terrace  of  St.  Cloud  looks  down  upon  the  Seine,  shining 
like  silver  in  the  sun.  Over  back  of  a  hill  wliich  the  horizon 
touches,  lies  Versailles,  where  the  Great  Revolution  was  born 
in  the  tennis  court.  There  was  its  cradle ;  St.  Cloud  is  its 
grave.  And  off  against  the  heights  of  Montmartre  glistens 
the  dome  of  the  Invalides !     A  big  grey  fortress  still  crowns 


114     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  towering  Mt.  Valerien.  That  was  the  last  stronghold  of 
France  in  the  Franco-Prussian  war  of  1870-71.  The  Ger- 
mans were  at  St.  Cloud,  too,  and  the  French  guns  on  Mt. 
Valerien  shot  the  chateau  to  pieces.  After  the  war,  its 
ruined  walls  were  torn  down,  not  one  stone  being  left  upon 
another,  and  now  the  grass  is  green  and  the  flowers  bloom 
where  the  palace  of  the  Bourbons  and  the  Bonapartes  stood. 

As  Napoleon  seized  the  helm  of  the  ship  of  state,  he  an- 
nounced to  France  and  the  world,  "I  am  the  Revolution!" 
In  truth,  he  was  its  son  and  heir,  the  sole  legatee!  Out  of 
all  that  forest  of  pikes  came  his  sword  alone ;  out  of  that  babel 
of  sound  and  fury  one  clear,  commanding  voice ;  out  of  that 
multitude  of  thoughts  and  purposes  and  plans  one  powerful 
will;  out  of  that  era  of  dreams  there  issued  this  reality. 

In  the  eyes  of  France,  the  Revolution  had  not  been  over- 
thrown ;  it  was  embodied  in  Napoleon.  With  a  sense  of  peace 
and  justice,  the  exhausted  nation  reposed  in  his  strong  arms. 
Mathieu  Dumas  tells  us  that  he  ''did  not  injure  liberty,  as 
it  did  not  exist.  He  strangled  the  monster  of  anarchy  and 
saved  France." 

Chaos  vanished  before  his  frown.  The  hateful  law  of  hos- 
tages was  repealed  and  he  went  in  person  to  throw  open  the 
prison  doors  of  the  temple.  Imprisoned  or  banished  priests, 
who  had  taken  the  republican  oath,  received  the  freedom  of 
the  country.  The  national  securities  rose  from  twelve  to 
twenty  francs  in  Ave  days. 

The  masses  and  the  classes  alike  welcomed  the  advance 
agent  of  prosperity.  The  banks  trustingly  opened  their 
strong  boxes  to  him,  and  an  individual  citizen  came  forward 
with  a  loan  of  $100,000  to  a  government  that  had  lacked  the 
money  to  pay  the  expenses  of  a  courier  to  its  army  in  Italy. 

In  a  month  there  was  a  new  constitution,  which  provided 
that  Napoleon  should  be  First  Consul  for  ten  years,  with  full 
executive  power  and  a  salary  of  $100,000  a  year.  The  Second 
and  Third  Consuls  were  left  almost  as  powerless  as  the  Vice- 
president  of  the  United  States,  and  were  retained  only  to  dis- 
guise the  one-man  despotism.  The  people  continued  in  pos- 
session of  manhood  suffrage,  but  were  removed  as  far  as  pos- 


In    the    fciADULE,    li\    liELLA.NUt; 


RULER  OF  FRANCE  115 

sible  from  the  control  of  the  government.  The  5,000,000 
men  of  voting  age  in  the  country  were  to  choose  500,000  per- 
sons, who  in  turn,  were  to  choose  50,000  and  finally  they  were 
to  choose  5000,  From  these  5000  notables,  all  the  offices  were 
to  be  filled. 

There  were  to  be  a  council,  a  senate,  a  tribunate,  and  a 
legislature.  The  Consuls  were  to  appoint  the  council  and 
a  majority  of  senators,  after  which  these  latter  were  them- 
selves to  complete  the  composition  of  the  senate,  which, 
finally,  was  to  choose  from  the  notables  the  members  of  the 
tribunate  and  the  legislature.  No  one  was  to  be  directly 
elected  by  the  people. 

The  council,  presided  over  by  the  First  Consul,  was  to 
propose  all  laws  to  the  tribunate,  where  they  were  to  be  de- 
bated and  then  referred  to  the  legislature — "a  deaf  and 
dumb  assembly" — which  was  to  adopt  or  reject  the  proposals 
in  silence,  after  which  the  laws  were  to  go  before  the  senate, 
also  a  mute  body,  which  had  only  the  power  to  veto  legisla- 
tion. 

In  two  months  this  elaborate  scheme  of  government  was  in 
full  operation,  and  in  less  than  three  weeks  after  the  legisla- 
tive bodies  had  assembled,  the  judiciary  and  the  entire  gov- 
ernment of  France  down  to  the  smallest  municipality  were 
completely  reorganised;  a  new  system  of  taxation  was  de- 
vised and  the  great  Bank  of  France  established.  At  the  same 
time  Napoleon  brought  to  an  end  eight  years  of  civil  war  in 
Vendee  and  elsewhere  in  Brittany  and  Normandy,  where  a 
royalist  and  Catholic  population  had  made  a  stubborn  re- 
sistance to  the  Revolution  and  the  Republic.  Peace  and  pros- 
perity were  the  twin  blessings  received  by  France  in  a 
crowded  three  months.  Then  an  election  was  held  and  the 
people  ratified  the  new  constitution. 

Napoleon  and  Josephine  installed  themselves  in  the  palace 
of  the  Luxembourg  immediately  after  the  coup  d'etat  at  St. 
Cloud.  The  directors  had  been  living  in  that  palace  and  now 
the  Consuls  supplanted  them.  How  few  were  the  years  since 
the  Luxembourg  had  been  the  prison  of  Josephine's  first  hus- 
band, when  it  was  crowded,  with  the  victims  of  the  Terror  and 


116 


IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 


she  herself  was  a  prisoner  in  the  Carmelite  convent  a  little 
way  down  the  street ! 

But  the  Tuileries,  not  the  Luxembourg,  was  the  palace  of 
the  kings.  It  was  not  from  idle  vanity  that  Napoleon  longed 
to  move  over  the  Seine  and  live  in  that  home  of  royalty. 
For  the  same  purpose  that  the  chief  of  a  provisional  govern- 
ment in  the  United  States  might  wish  to  occupy  the  White 
House,  the  First  Consul  desired  to  possess  himself  of  the  tra- 
ditional seat  of  power  and  authority  in  France. 

Such  a  change  in  quarters,  however,  might  awaken  the 
mob  that  he  himself  had  watched  seven  years  before  while  it 
drove  Louis  XVI  from  the  throne  of  his  fathers.  As  he  pon- 
dered the  question,  the  news  came  of  the  death  of  Washing- 
ton. He  seized  upon  the  event  to  distract  the  attention  of  the 
republicans  from  his  despotic  designs.  Proclaiming  a  period 
of  mourning  and  holding  a  memorial  festival,  he  evoked  the 
shade  of  the  immortal  friend  of  liberty  and  enemy  of  tyrants 
as  a  screen  for  his  entry  into  the  abiding  place  of  the  Bour- 
bon monarchs.  Thither  he  drove  behind  six  white  horses,  and 
wearing  a  magnificent  sabre,  gifts  of  the  Emperor  of  Ger- 
many. As  he  passed  within  the  gate  he  could  have  read  on 
one  of  the  stone  posts  this  boast  of  the  Eepublic : 


The  10th  of  August,  1792, 

ROYALTY  IN  FRANCE 

IS  ABOLISHED  AND  SHALL 

NEVER  BE  RE-ESTABLISHED. 


He  permitted  the  sign  to  remain  on  the  gate  post,  but  as 
he  walked  over  the  great  palace,  he  found  some  liberty  caps 
painted  in  red  on  the  walls.  "Get  rid  of  those  things,"  he 
commanded;  "I  do  not  like  to  see  such  rubbish." 

Turning  to  his  secretary,  he  said :"  To  be  at  the  Tuileries, 
Bourrienne,  is  not  all.  We  must  stay  here.  Who,  in  heaven's 
name,  has  not  already  inhabited  this  place?     Euffians,  con- 


RULER  OF  FRANCE  117 

ventionalists !  But,  stop,  there  is  your  uncle's  shop.  Was 
it  not  from  those  windows  1  saw  the  Tuileries  besieged  and 
the  good  Louis  XVI  carried  off?  Be  assured,  they  will  not 
come  here  again!" 


CHAPTER  XV 

CROSSING  THE  ALPS 

1800     AGE  30 

THERE  is  a  little  cottage  at  Bourg  St.  Pierre,  the  tiny- 
Swiss  hamlet  that  lies  on  a  shelf  more  than  half-way 
up  the  snowy  side  of  the  Great  St.  Bernard.  Its  un- 
painted  walls  have  been  stained  by  wind  and  rain  a  deep, 
rich  brown  like  all  the  rest  of  the  fifty  or  sixty  habitations 
in  that  rude  and  lonely  Alpine  village. 

Yet  it  has  its  distinguishing  mark,  and  every  one  in  the 
place  calls  it  "The  House  with  Three  "Windows."  But  the 
villagers  have  found  that  for  some  reason  or  other  the 
stranger  is  more  impressed  if  they  point  it  out  as  "The 
House  of  the  Guide  of  Napoleon." 

St.  Pierre  also  boasts  an  inn  with  a  significant  name,  the 
Hotel  au  Dejeuner  de  Napoleon.  There  the  curious  traveller 
may  sit  in  the  veritable  chair  and  at  the  veritable  table  of 
the  historic  breakfast  and  listen  to  the  story  of  it  from  the 
lips  of  the  granddaughter  of  the  innkeeper  who  served  it,  un- 
til he  is  so  distracted  by  the  feast  of  memory  she  spreads  be- 
fore him  he  can  hardly  do  single-minded  justice  to  her  wor- 
thy omelet.  The  old  pictures  of  the  grandparents  and  their 
immortal  guest  hanging  on  the  panelled  walls  and  the  china 
and  pewter  accessories  of  that  dejeuner  113  years  ago  are  a 
banquet  in  themselves. 

As  the  granddaughter  of  the  old  innkeeper  presides  now 
over  the  Hotel  au  Dejeuner  de  Napoleon,  so  a  grandson  of 
the  guide  dwells  in  the  Maison  du  Guide  de  Napoleon.  To- 
gether they  industriously  polish  and  keep  shining  the 
memory  of  the  great  little  man,  all  buttoned  up  to  the  chin 

118 


CROSSING  THE  ALPS  119 

in  a  big  grey  overcoat,  who  rode  out  of  St.  Pierre  on  a  mule 
one  May  morning  in  the  year  1800,  a  Swiss  peasant  walking 
beside  him. 

The  rider  was  the  First  Consul  of  France,  who  in  six 
months  had  restored  peace  at  home,  but  had  failed  to  obtain 
peace  abroad.  As  it  is  said  of  a  man  who  takes  a  disputed 
land  title  that  "he  has  bought  a  lawsuit,"  so  Napoleon  in  as- 
suming charge  of  the  French  government  took  upon  him- 
self an  irrepressible  conflict  with  the  other  nations  of  Europe. 

The  Revolution  had  hoisted  its  tricoloured  flag  on  the  castles 
of  conquered  lands,  and  it  was  not  for  him  to  haul  it  down, 
to  surrender  what  the  French  had  purchased  with  their  blood. 
Thus  the  Napoleonic  wars,  in  their  early  stages  at  least,  were 
the  inevitable  sequence  of  the  wars  of  the  Revolution. 

Austria  had  yielded  to  Napoleon  three  years  before,  but 
not  until  he  had  whipped  five  of  her  armies.  While  he  was 
before  the  walls  of  the  far-away  town  of  Acre,  the  French 
ambassadors  to  the  congress  of  peace  at  Rastadt  were  mur- 
dered by  Austrians,  and  Austria  rushing  into  a  new  war,  took 
from  France  all  the  ground  he  had  won  for  her  in  Italy, 

Aided  by  a  subsidy  from  Great  Britain,  the  Austrians  were 
preparing  now  to  invade  France  herself  and  dictate  terms  of 
peace  to  the  French  people  from  their  own  capital.  An  Aus- 
trian army  of  120,000  men  had  marched  across  Germany  and 
around  the  upper  end  of  the  long  Alpine  wall  which  defends 
the  approaches  to  France ;  but  only  to  be  hurled  back  from 
the  Rhine  to  the  Danube  by  a  great  French  army  under  Gen- 
eral Moreau. 

Another  Austrian  army  of  nearly  120,000  men  in  Italy, 
however,  had  caught  a  little  French  force  under  General 
]\Iassena  and  shut  it  up  within  the  walls  of  Genoa.  Its  sur- 
render was  a  questiop  only  of  days.  Then  the  Austrians 
would  be  free  to  march  around  the  lower  end  of  the  Alpine 
wall,  where  its  base  is  washed  by  the  waters  of  the  J\Iediter- 
ranean,  and  enter  southern  France.  They  were  confident  of 
victory  and  all  Europe  seemed  to  share  their  confidence. 

Napoleon  could  not  send  a  great  army  against  the  enemy  in 
Italy  as  he  had  in  Germany,  because  the  Austrian  soldiers  and 


120  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  British  gTinboats  together  could  easily  defend  the  narrow 
path  along  the  mountainous  shore.  Apparently  there  was 
nothing  for  him  to  do  but  wait  and  accept  battle  on  French 
soil.  He  confirmed  that  general  view  of  the  situation  by 
noisily  proclaiming  the  formation  of  the  Army  of  Reserve  at 
Dijon,  ostensibly  for  the  purpose  of  meeting  the  invaders  in 
the  Valley  of  the  Rhone. 

But  the  spies  of  the  enemy  and  the  representatives  of  the 
foreign  press,  who  rushed  to  Dijon,  found  only  the  skeleton 
of  a  military  body  there.  This  exposure  of  his  feeble  re- 
sources brought  upon  Napoleon  the  derisive  laughter  of  the 
nations.  His  boasted  Army  of  the  Reserve  was  the  butt  of 
the  caricaturists  and  the  jest  of  London  and  Vienna. 

The  other  governments,  however,  did  not  know  that  his  ex- 
traordinary success  in  hastily  patching  up  a  peace  with  the 
revolted  provinces  of  western  France  and  his  general  paci- 
fication of  the  country  had,  for  the  first  time  since  the  Revo- 
ultion  began,  released  for  the  foreign  service  all  the  military 
strength  of  the  Republic.  He  needed  no  army  to  defend  his 
government  at  home.  Even  in  the  garrisons  of  Paris  he  had 
only  2300  men,  a  much  smaller  force  than  was  employed  to 
preserve  the  peace  in  London  herself. 

Nor  did  his  enemies  know  that  while  his  phantom  army  at 
Dijon  was  contributing  to  the  gaiety  of  nations,  a  regiment 
was  quietly  forming  here,  a  brigade  there  in  various  parts  of 
France  and  stealthily  marching  by  itself  toward  Switzer- 
land. Its  own  officers  had  no  idea  of  its  real  destination. 
Even  the  minister  of  war  was  not  in  the  secret. 

As  those  mysterious  and  mystified  commands,  coming  by 
many  roads,  met  on  the  banks  of  Lake  Geneva  at  Lausanne 
they  were  amazed  to  find  themselves  an  army — the  real  Army 
of  the  Reserve — under  the  command  of  Napoleon  himself, 
who  marched  them  squarely  against  the  Alps  at  Martigny. 
He  v/as  going  to  steal  up  the  Alpine  wall  and  jump  down  on 
the  unsuspecting  Austriaus! 

Magnificent  highways  run  over  the  Alps  to-day  and  luxuri- 
ous express  trains  run  under  them — it  is  hardly  more  than 
an  hour  from  Martigny  itself  to  Italy  by  the  great  Simplon 


'ma 

mms  .■ 

::  tityag 

\e-Tj— 

Sim 

;f  ■■■■  p 
.    ■■■■   c 

„  --»- 

•■.^Jr-^    " 

.* 


4J    -t 


CROSSING  THE  ALPS  121 

tunnel.  But  there  was  not  a  wagon  track  for  Napoleon. 
Among  the  mere  foot  trails  over  the  steep  passes,  he  chose  the 
steepest  of  all,  the  Great  St.  Bernard,  because  it  was  the 
shortest  and  would  take  him  closest  to  the  rear  of  the  Aus- 
trians. 

As  another  youth  with  the  same  sad  brow  and  flashing  blue 
eye,  who  bore  mid  snow  and  ice  a  banner  with  a  strange  de- 
vice, was  warned  by  the  prudent  against  the  roaring  torrent 
and  the  awful  avalanche  of  the  St.  Bernard,  the  army  engi- 
neers, returning  from  their  inspection,  shook  their  cautious 
heads  at  the  young  First  Consul  and  echoed,  "Try  not  the 
pass!" 

"Difficult,  granted,"  he  replied  to  the  engineers;  "but  is  it 
possible?"  They  admitted  the  possibility.  "Then  let  us 
start!"  He  did  not  cry  " Excelsior ! "  But  no  doubt  he  had 
his  secret   watchword — "Empire!" 

If  CharlemagTie  had  led  an  army  over  the  St.  Bernard  1000 
years  before,  and  Hannibal  had  crossed  the  Alps  2000  years 
before  with  troops  reared  beneath  a  tropic  sun  and  encum- 
bered with  a  train  of  elephants,  why  should  Napoleon  be 
daunted?  "An  army  can  pass  at  all  times,"  he  said,  "wher- 
ever two  men  can  set  their  feet." 

For  nearly  a  week  he  sent  his  army  out  of  Martigny,  a  di- 
vision a  day,  to  scale  the  6600-foot  wall  that  towers  above  the 
town  and  from  its  top  to  let  themselves  down  6000  feet  into 
the  valley  of  Aosta  on  the  other  side.  For  two  months  he 
had  been  preparing  for  the  march.  All  the  necessary  sup- 
plies had  been  collected  by  him  as  secretly  as  he  had  assembled 
the  army  itself.  His  troops  marching  in  a  few  hours  from 
the  warm  sunshine  of  the  lowlands  into  the  ice  and  snow 
of  the  sunless  gorges  might  succumb  to  the  change  and  the 
cold;  he  had  laid  in  an  immense  stock  of  clothing  and  shoes 
and  he  saw  to  it  that  every  man  was  properly  clad  and  shod. 
As  the  day  grew  warmer  and  the  snow  began  to  melt,  the 
perils  from  avalanches  would  increase;  he  ordered  each 
division  to  be  at  the  foot  of  the  mountain  and  ready  to  start 
before  two  o'clock  in  the  morning,  thus  making  the  most  dan- 
gerous part  of  the  passage  in  the  night.     To  fortify  the  weaker 


122     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

for  the  crossing  and  to  resuscitate  them  at  the  end  of  their 
arduous  tramp,  he  set  up  hospitals  on  either  side  of  the  moun- 
tains. The  line  of  march,  starting  in  an  almost  barren 
region,  soon  left  all  vegetation  behind ;  he  arranged  for  the 
army  to  carry  every  morsel  of  food  and  forage  for  men  and 
beasts,  sixty  or  seventy  pounds  being  loaded  on  the  back  of 
each  man. 

The  road  from  Martigny  to  the  valley  of  Aosta  in  Italy  is 
more  than  forty  miles  long.  But  from  Bourg  St.  Pierre  there 
was  no  road  at  all  in  Napoleon's  day,  only  a  path  up  to  the 
summit  of  the  St.  Bernard,  eight  miles,  and  then  for  another 
seven  or  eight  miles  down  to  St.  Rhemy  on  the  Italian  side. 
Nothing  could  go  over  that  part  of  the  pass  on  wheels.  But 
the  artillery-men  found  a  gang  of  expert  workmen  at  St. 
Pierre  ready  to  take  their  gun  carriages  and  ammunition 
wagons  to  pieces  and  pack  the  parts,  properly  numbered,  on 
the  backs  of  mules. 

Sledges  had  been  provided  for  the  cannon,  but  they  proved 
to  be  useless.  Thereupon  fir  trees  were  cut  down  and  their 
trunks  split  in  two  and  hollowed  out.  The  gun  was  laid  in 
one-half  of  the  hollowed  log,  while  the  other  half  was  fastened 
over  it  as  a  covering. 

It  was  found  that  even  this  could  not  be  hauled  up  the  pass 
by  the  mules.  The  peasant  mountaineers  were  called  in  and 
Napoleon  offered  to  pay  them  1200  francs  ($240)  for  each 
cannon  they  transported.  But  it  took  100  men  two  days  to 
drag  a  gun  over  the  path.  After  a  few  gangs  had  attempted 
it,  the  peasants  gave  up  the  task. 

Napoleon  finally  appealed  to  his  soldiers  and  they  threw 
themselves  at  the  Alps  as  if  they  were  an  enemy  in  arms, 
while  bands  and  drummers  and  buglers,  posted  at  the  hard- 
est points,  played  the  stirring  tunes  of  the  Revolution.  Pa- 
triotism did  what  gold  could  not  do. 

As  each  division  of  troops  mounted  to  the  top  of  the  pass 
and  arrived  at  the  Hospice  of  St.  Bernard  it  was  greeted  by 
the  monks,  who  having  laid  in  abundant  supplies  at  Napo- 
leon's request  and  expense,  gave  the  soldiers  a  delightful  sur- 
prise, eveiy  man  receiving  bread  and  cheese  and  wine.     Down 


CROSSING  THE  ALPS  123 

at  St.  Rhemy,  where  the  path  ended  on  the  Italian  side  and 
the  road  began,  not  only  was  a  hospital  set  up  but  all  man- 
ner of  craftsmen  were  assembled.  If  a  strap  on  a  mule  was 
broken,  saddlers  were  there  ready  to  repair  it,  while  other 
workmen  put  together  the  gun  carriages  and  ammunition 
wagons  and  remounted  the  cannon  as  fast  as  they  arrived. 

Napoleon  stayed  at  the  lowland  home  of  the  monks  of  St. 
Bernard,  the  monastery  which  still  stands  by  the  old  church 
in  Martigny,  until  he  had  seen  to  the  last  detail  and  de- 
spatched the  last  division.  His  battle  against  the  Alps  was 
won,  and  as  he  rode  out  of  Bourg  St.  Pierre,  after  the  now- 
celebrated  dejeuner,  he  seemed  to  have  no  more  serious  in- 
terests than  the  curiosity  of  an  idle  traveller. 

As  his  mule  plodded  up  the  heights  by  the  tumbling,  rush- 
ing Valsorey,  he  listened  to  the  roaring  and  crashing  noises 
that  broke  the  silence  of  the  lonely  pass  and  the  musical  call 
of  the  herdsmen  from  peak  to  peak.  Always  charmed  by  the 
sound  of  a  bell  he  hearkened  to  the  loud  tinkling  of  the  big 
Alpine  cowbells  as  they  rang  out  above  the  singing  torrent. 
This  pretty  picture  has  been  transferred  by  Emerson  from 
the  pages  of  history  to  the  pages  of  poetry  and  philosophy  in 
his  "Each  and  All:" 

The  heifer  that  lows  in  the  upland  farm, 

Far  heard,  lows  not  thine  ear  to  charm; 

The  sexton,  tolling  his  bell  at  noon, 

Dreams  not  that  great  Napoleon 

Stops  his  horse,  and  lists  with  delight 

Whilst  his  files  sweep  round  yon  Alpine  height; 

Nor  knowest  thou  what  argument 

Thy  life  to  thy  neighbour's  creed  has  lent. 

If  the  sexton  did  not  deem  that  the  great  Napoleon  paused 
entranced  by  the  music  of  his  noontime  bell,  so  even  the  moun- 
taineer who  walked  beside  the  mule  of  the  little  great  man  in 
the  big  grey  coat  did  not  dream  that  he  was  guiding  Napoleon 
to  his  destiny.  Peasant  and  ruler  chatted  on  easy  terms  as 
they  toiled  together  up  the  gorges  of  the  St.  Bernard,  while 
the  stranger  questioned  and  the  countryman  explained  his 
little  world.     Tempted  to  confidences,  the  guide  told  of  his 


124     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

sweetheart  in  the  valley  and  how  poverty  had  baffled  their 
mating,  of  his  humble  life  and  modest  ambitions. 

"What  above  all  things  desirest  thou  most  at  this  instant 
to  make  thee  happy?"  the  traveller  asked. 

"That  mule  you  are  riding,"  the  peasant  replied  without 
need  of  hesitating. 

Not  only  did  he  get  his  wish  and  return  to  his  neighbours 
the  proud  and  happy  owner  of  the  coveted  animal,  but 
not  long  afterward  an  agent  of  the  French  minister  to 
Switzerland  sought  him  out  with  a  gift  beyond  his  dreams. 
By  the  command  of  the  First  Consul  of  France,  the  agent 
came  to  arrange  for  the  purchase  or  erection  of  a  house  and 
to  provide  the  means  for  the  guide's  marriage. 

The  little  great  man's  activities  as  a  matchmaker  and  pro- 
moter of  weddings  have  fallen  under  the  censure  of  his- 
torians.    But  surely  they  must  all  forgive  him  this  time. 

That  little,  unpainted,  weather-stained  cottage  in  a  Swiss 
hamlet,  the  House  with  Three  Windows  at  Bourg  St.  Pierre, 
that  simple  monument  of  the  gratitude  of  Napoleon,  has  out- 
lasted his  magnificent  palaces  and  even  the  splendid  edifice 
of  his  great  Empire.  The  Tuileries  and  St.  Cloud  are  gone, 
but  the  Maison  du  Guide  de  Napoleon  still  stands  and  shelters 
the  grateful  posterity  of  the  guide.  Mighty  works  wrought 
by  the  power  of  Napoleon  and  dedicated  to  his  glory  have 
passed  away,  but  a  simple  deed  of  kindness  endures. 

A  carriage  road  has  taken  the  place  of  the  rough  trail 
Napoleon  followed  over  the  wild,  deep  ravine  of  the  Valsorey, 
where  the  French  army  found  its  steepest  climb ;  through  the 
forest  of  St.  Pierre,  where  the  trees  make  their  final  stand 
against  the  wintry  desert  of  stone,  and  then  on  to  the  last  in- 
habited house,  the  Cantine  de  Proz,  where  even  man  sur- 
renders to  the  arid  heights. 

]\Iore  than  1000  feet  below  the  Hospice  of  St.  Bernard  is  its 
outpost,  the  little  stone  hospitalet  or  refuge.  Here  and  there 
a  solitary  tree  rises  from  the  stones  to  stand  like  a  sentinel  at 
his  post,  guarding  the  lowlands  against  the  advance  of  desola- 
tion. In  the  drear  Combe  des  ]\Iorts  itself — the  Valley  of 
Death — beautiful   Alpine   flowers,   hardiest   dwellers   in   the 


CROSSING  THE  ALPS  125 

floral  world,  garland  the  shoulders  of  the  mountain  and  fain 
would  crown  him. 

Even  in  early  July,  the  shovelled  road  mounts  between  snow 
banks  six  and  seven  feet  high  to  the  little  plain  where  the 
grey  walls  of  the  Hospice  of  St.  Bernard  rise  out  of  the  white 
earth  in  a  cold  haze  toward  a  sombre  sky,  as  melancholy  a 
scene  as  can  be  imagined.  An  enclosed  bridge  connects 
two  severely  plain  stone  buildings,  standing  on  either  side 
of  the  road.  One  is  the  monastery  and  the  other  the  Hotel 
St.  Louis,  a  necessary  refuge  for  the  brothers  in  case  of  fire, 
and  which  also  serves  as  a  lodging  for  poor  wayfarers  and  a 
shelter  for  the  horses  of  travellers. 

It  was  in  the  depth  of  the  dark  ages  that  a  young  dreamer, 
St.  Bernard  de  Menthon,  quit  a  world  filled  with  hate  and  war 
to  set  up  the  cross  on  the  lofty  and  peaceful  heights  of  the 
Alps  as  a  beacon  along  the  pilgrimage  road  to  Rome,  as  a 
sanctuary  for  the  storm-beaten  wayfarer.  Although  the  rail- 
roads and  highroads  under  and  over  the  Alpine  chain  have 
largely  reduced  the  necessity  for  this  rescue  work  in  our  time, 
gentle  souls  still  hearken  to  the  call  of  St.  Bernard's  cross 
and,  leaving  self  and  a  world  of  selfish  strife  below,  go  up  in 
the  mountains  to  devote  their  lives  to  an  ideal. 

In  the  chapel  are  two  strange  companions,  a  portrait  of 
the  peace-loving  founder  of  the  order  and  the  sculptured 
monument  of  a  war-loving  youth.  This  is  General  Desaix, 
and  the  white  marble  memorial  of  him  was  set  up  by  Napo- 
leon as  a  testimony  to  his  admiration  and  regret  for  a  brilliant 
young  general,  who  crossed  the  Alps  only  to  meet  his  death 
on  the  field  of  IMarengo.  Generations  of  monks  have  cher- 
ished the  traditions  of  Napoleon's  hour  of  rest  at  the  Hospice, 
and  the  goblet  from  which  he  drank  is  treasured  to  this  day. 
As  he  came  away  from  the  monastery  and  proceeded  past  the 
lonely  statue  of  St.  Bernard  on  the  bleak  plain  beyond  the 
little  lake,  he  saw  a  wonderful  toboggan  chute  glistening  in 
the  Italian  sun.  It  had  been  worn  smooth  by  the  thousands 
of  soldiers  who  had  seated  themselves  in  the  snow  and  slid 
down  the  steep  mountain  side. 

Following  the  example   of  his  men,  he  himself  took  the 


126     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

toboggan  and  was  fairly  shot  into  Italy,  where  the  Austrians 
were  as  surprised  to  see  him  descend  upon  them  as  if  he  had 
dropped  from  Mars  with  a  parachute. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

MARENGO  LOST  AND  WON 

1800     AGE   30 

TWO  months  before  he  crossed  the  Alps,  Napoleon 
lay  on  a  big  map  of  Italy,  which  had  been  spread  on 
the  floor  of  the  Tuileries  in  Paris.  As  he  studied  the 
map  he  stuck  pins  in  it,  here  and  there,  some  of  them  tipped 
with  red  wax  and  the  others  with  black. 

Bourrienne,  who  knelt  on  the  map  beside  him,  says  that 
when  Napoleon  had  finished  this  operation  he  asked,  "Where 
do  you  think  I  shall  beat  j\Ielas  ? "  "  How  the  devil  should  I 
know?"  Bourrienne  replied. 

"Why,  look  here,  you  fool,"  said  the  other  man  on  the 
floor,  "Melas  is  at  Alessandria,  with  his  headquarters.  There 
he  will  remain  until  Genoa  surrenders.  Crossing  the  Alps 
here,"  and  he  pointed  to  a  red  pin  at  the  Great  St.  Bernard, 
"I  shall  fall  upon  him,  cut  his  communications  and  meet  him 
there,"  pointing  to  a  red  pin  at  San  Giuliauo.  "Poor  M.  de 
Melas, "  he  chuckled;  "he  will  pass  through  Turin,  fall  back 
upon  Alessandria,  I  shall  cross  the  Po,  overtake  him  on  the 
road  to  Piacenza,  on  the  plains  of  the  Scrivia,  and  I  shall 
beat  him  just  there,  just  there  ! ' ' 

It  was  in  June,  1800,  nearly  three  months  after  that  re- 
ported forecast,  when  Bourrienne  found  himself  watching 
from  the  height  of  San  Giuliano  the  smoke  of  battle  rising 
from  the  field  of  Marengo.  Napoleon  had  crossed  the  Alps, 
cut  the  communications  of  General  ]\Ielas,  the  Austrian  com- 
mander in  Italy,  and  now  was  meeting  him  in  the  valley 
below  San  Giuliano. 

The  decisive  battle  came  before  either  side  was  ready  for  it. 
Taken  by  surprise,  Melas  had  been  able  to  assemble  of  his 

127 


128  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

immense  but  widely  scattered  forces  only  about  30,000  men 
at  Alessandria,  when  the  French  presented  themselves  be- 
fore the  brick  wall  of  that  town,  which  is  an  important  place 
sixty  miles  south  of  Milan. 

Napoleon,  on  his  part,  had  neglected  for  once  his  adopted 
maxim  that  ''God  is  always  on  the  side  of  the  heaviest  bat- 
talions." He  had  tempted  fate  by  so  dispersing  his  army  as 
to  bring  perhaps  only  20,000  men  to  the  field  of  action  and 
only  forty  guns  to  meet  the  fire  of  the  200  Austrian  guns. 

For  five  hours  this  small  force  had  struggled  to  restrain  the 
advance  of  the  Austrians,  when  at  ten  o'clock  Napoleon  gal- 
loped upon  the  scene  of  battle  for  the  first  time.  With  him 
were  his  old  Guides,  now  the  Consular  Guard,  and  from  his 
shoulders  floated  the  cloak  which  was  destined  to  cover  his 
coffin  when  it  was  borne  to  the  willows  at  St.  Helena. 

Nearly  all  the  famous  battlefields  were  appointed  by  nature 
and  not  by  military  strategists.  We  hear  of  warriors  select- 
ing fields  of  combat,  but  they  only  seek  out  the  places  chosen 
for  them  long  ages  before  they  were  born,  generally  beside  a 
stream  or  a  hill. 

Looking  down  from  the  old  legendary  tower  of  Theodoric, 
the  great  Ostrogoth,  which  still  rises  among  the  orchard  trees 
of  Marengo,  one  sees  a  lazy  little  creek  meandering  over  the 
broad  plain  that  lies  before  the  eastern  gate  of  Alessandria. 
The  plain  is  like  a  great  football  field,  bordered  on  either  side 
by  hills  that  rise  like  the  tiers  of  a  grandstand,  with  the  Eiver 
Bormida  washing  the  old  walls  of  Alessandria  at  one  end  and 
the  heights  of  San  Giuliano  rising  at  the  other  end  of  the 
gridiron,  while  the  tiny  rivulet  Fontanone  is  the  fifty-yard 
line. 

Across  that  mere  brooklet  the  Battle  of  Marengo  was 
fought.  There,  by  the  steep  banks  of  a  reedy  ditch,  the  his- 
tory of  Europe  was  decided  for  fifteen  years.  At  two  o'clock 
of  a  June  afternoon  it  was  decided  favourably  to  Austria  and 
adversely  to  France,  for  then  Melas  had  crossed  the  creek  and 
smashed  Napoleon's  army  into  fragments.  Many  of  the 
French  were  in  a  rout,  but  others  stubbornly  contested 
the  ground  inch  by  inch  as  they  slowly  retreated  over  the 


MARENGO  LOST  AND  WON  129 

plain.  Lannes,  falling  back  at  the  head  of  a  small  brigade, 
yielded  only  a  mile  in  two  hours.  But  at  last  the  Consular 
Guard  itself  gave  way  under  a  blazing  artillery  fire. 

The  Battle  of  Marengo  was  lost,  and  with  it,  Napoleon's 
chance  for  empire.  A  messenger  hastily  stole  away  to  carry 
to  the  enemies  of  the  First  Consul  in  Paris  the  welcome  news 
that  fortune  had  deserted  him.  Revolutionary  Paris  need 
no  longer  fear  his  iron  hand. 

Suffering  from  the  heat  and  burdened  with  his  seventy 
years — Austria  persisted  in  her  policy  of  sending  old  men  to 
whip  this  Corsican  youth — General  Melas  left  the  field  of  vic- 
tory for  his  headquarters  in  Alessandria.  Having  silenced 
all  but  five  of  the  French  cannon,  it  was  time  for  the  aged 
General  to  lie  down  and  dictate  a  report,  telling  the  Emperor 
at  Vienna  how  he  had  slain  the  Goliath  of  the  Revolution 
with  the  pebbles  of  the  Brook  Fontanone. 

Meanwhile  Napoleon  was  sitting  on  the  ground,  behind  the 
sheltering  walls  of  the  little  village  of  IMarengo.  The  Con- 
sular Guard  was  drawn  up  about  him.  His  maps  were  spread 
beside  him.  But  he  was  not  looking  at  them,  nor  seemingly 
at  his  fleeing  soldiers  as  they  passed  him.  He  did  not  lift  his 
finger  in  an  effort  to  rally  them.  His  boldness  seemed  to 
have  forsaken  him,  as  he  sat  there  beating  up  the  dust  with 
his  riding  whip. 

He  still  entertained  a  faint  hope,  however,  that  before  the 
slow-going  Austrians  recovered  from  their  victory  and 
adopted  measures  for  following  it  up.  General  Desaix,  whom 
he  had  ordered  elsewhere,  might  yet  come  to  the  rescue. 
While  he  waited  and  hoped,  Savary,  an  aide-de-camp  of 
Desaix,  dashed  up  to  report  that  his  General,  having  heard 
the  sound  of  battle,  was  hastening  to  the  scene  with  his  5000 
men. 

Napoleon  at  once  sprang  into  his  saddle  and  spurred  his 
white  horse  among  his  retreating  troops,  forming  them  in 
line  again  in  front  of  San  Giuliano.  His  cocked  hat  blew 
off,  but  he  rode  on  bareheaded  through  the  ranks,  shouting: 
"My  friends,  we  have  fallen  back  far  enough.  Remember, 
soldiers,  it  is  my  habit  to  bivouac  on  the  field  of  battle." 


130     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

As  the  sun  was  descending  to  the  Alpine  horizon  the  Aus- 
trians,  with  colours  flying  and  bands  playing,  leisurely  moved 
forward  from  Marengo.  They  were  content  merely  to  drive 
the  enemy  from  the  field,  for  to  all  the  old  generals  of  Europe 
war  was  only  an  interminable  game  of  checkers,  not  a  fight 
to  a  finish.  On  they  went  until  they  were  within  100  paces 
of  Desaix's  force,  but  without  seeing  it  through  a  field  of  high- 
standing  wheat  and  the  thick  leaves  of  a  vineyard  that 
screened  the  French. 

Suddenly  the  hidden  army  sprang  at  the  surprised  Aus- 
trians,  and  out  of  the  grain  and  the  vines  blazed  a  heavy  mus- 
ketry fire.  The  line  of  white  coats  wavered,  but  quickly  ral- 
lied. Soon,  however,  600  French  cavalry  under  young 
Kellermann  dashed  upon  their  flank  and  carried  chaos  among 
the  Austrians.  Their  ranking  officer  and  6000  men  were 
taken  prisoners. 

The  French  line  began  to  advance,  and  the  victors  of  a  few 
minutes  before  found  themselves  rolled  back  among  the  10,000 
dead  and  wounded  lying  on  the  plain.  The  retreating  white 
coats  hurried  past  Marengo,  jumped  the  creek  and  then  ran 
for  their  lives  to  the  bridges  over  the  Kiver  Bormida,  where 
it  flows  between  Alessandria  and  the  battlefield.  "When  night 
fell  there  was  not  an  Austrian  in  arms  on  the  field  of  Marengo. 

Desaix  had  saved  the  day  but  he  had  been  killed  at  the 
head  of  his  column.  "What  a  triumph  this  would  have  been 
if  I  could  have  embraced  Desaix  on  the  field  of  battle,"  the 
General-in-chief  exclaimed.  Then  he  added,  with  quickly  ris- 
ing spirits,  "Little  Kellermann  made  a  lucky  charge.  We 
are  much  indebted  to  him.  You  see  what  trifling  circum- 
stances decide  these  affairs." 

On  a  field  where  his  genius  shone  at  its  poorest.  Napoleon 
reaped  probably  his  greatest  harvest  of  glory.  Although  he 
had  correctly  foretold  the  battle  nearly  three  months,  it 
found  him  unready  and  absent  from  the  scene  until  the  fight 
was  more  than  half  over.  As  he  saw  his  array  smashed  and 
driven  from  the  plain,  he  contrived  no  timely  expedient,  no 
brilliant  exploit  to  turn  the  engulfing  tide  of  disaster,  and  he 
was  saved  at  last  by  Desaix  and  by  Kellermann. 


I 


MARENGO  LOST  AND  WON  131 

Success  came  to  him  only  as  a  stroke  of  luck.  Yet  it  right- 
fully belonged  to  him,  in  accordance  with  the  rules  that  gov- 
ern our  world  of  chance.  He  had  surmounted  the  Alps  and 
placed  himself  where  luck  could  find  him,  where  a  few  of 
Desaix's  muskets  and  Kellermaun's  horses  could  win  a  great 
victory.  The  battle  of  Marengo  really  was  won  in  March 
when  Napoleon  lay  on  the  floor  of  the  Tuileries,  sticking  red 
pins  and  black  into  the  map  of  Italy. 

Marengo  is  to-day  the  best  cherished  of  all  the  fields  of 
Napoleon's  victories.  His  battle  grounds  lie  generally  in 
alien  lands  among  conquered  peoples,  who  naturally  have  not 
done  much  to  commemorate  his  triumphs  over  them.  His 
Italian  victories,  however,  were  not  won  against  Italians  but 
against  Austrians,  and  in  the  end  United  Italy  slowly  rose  to 
independence  from  the  battlefields  of  Napoleon,  who  only 
blazed  the  path  for  Victor  Emmanuel. 

The  last  of  these,  the  climax,  was  Marengo.  He  fondly 
planned  the  erection  of  a  monumental  city  there,  a  city  of 
victories,  with  beautiful  avenues  bearing  the  names  of  his 
generals  and  adorned  with  temples  and  sculptures.  But  those 
castles  of  glory  remained  in  the  air,  never  emerging  from  his 
dreams  into  reality.  Long  after  his  bones  were  dust  and  his 
sword  was  rust,  a  patriotic  Italian  of  Alessandria  bought 
Marengo  and  made  it  a  Napoleonic  museum. 

About  all  there  was  to  the  village  when  the  battle  immor- 
talised its  name  was  an  old  roadside  tavern,  with  its  stables 
and  sheds  and  its  ancient  tower,  which  legend  ascribes  to  a 
palace  erected  there  by  Theodoric  some  1400  years  ago. 
Against  the  stony  sides  of  those  structures  the  red  tide  of 
battle  surged  and  the  leaden  hail  pelted  as  the  contending 
armies  took  and  retook  the  sheltering  walls. 

The  tavern  still  stands  by  the  road,  along  which  a  rural 
trolley  line  now  makes  its  way.  Its  sign,  "Albergo  Marengo" 
is  covered  with  the  scars  of  time  if  not  of  battle.  The  al- 
bergo  is  unchanged  by  the  years,  and  one  might  say  unswept 
by  the  generations  that  have  come  and  gone  since  Napoleon 
sat  in  its  lee,  beating  up  the  dust  with  his  riding  whip.  But 
against  its  wall  and  behind  an  iron  fence,  with  golden  tipped 


132  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

pikes  and  lances  and  battle  axes  on  top  of  it,  there  rises  the 
monumental  palace  built  by  the  Alessandrian  citizen. 

"Within  this  fence  is  the  court  of  honour  and  a  statue  of 
the  young  First  Consul,  whose  feet  are  planted  on  a  block  of 
red  granite  from  the  Alps  which  he  crossed  to  write  the  name 
of  Marengo  on  the  list  of  his  victories.  The  palace  walls  ris- 
ing behind  and  on  one  side  of  the  court  of  honour  are  entirely 
covered  with  most  amazing  frescoes,  depicting  the  spires  and 
domes  and  arches,  avenues,  palaces,  temples,  and  belvederes 
of  Napoleon's  dream  city  of  victories,  as  they  might  have 
looked  if  his  dream  had  come  true.  Out  of  this  gorgeous 
fantasy,  the  victor  floats  at  full  length  while  victory  crowns 
him  with  laurels,  and  Desaix,  Kellermann  and  other  generals 
are  also  portrayed. 

Back  of  the  palace  are  the  old  tavern  stable  and  sheds,  still 
echoing  to  the  imagination  the  moans  of  the  poor  wounded 
fellows  who  were  carried  there  from  the  battlefield.  A  stage 
coach  of  the  Empress  Marie  Louise  has  been  brought  from 
somewhere  and  in  all  its  gaudiness  is  installed  in  a  shabby 
barn. 

Within  the  silent,  untenanted  palace  itself  is  a  gorgeous 
gallery  of  the  apotheosis,  and  there  are  also  chambers  lined 
with  pistols,  muskets,  swords,  sabres,  knives,  and  all  manner 
of  rusty,  murderous  things  raked  in  from  the  battlefield. 
The  table  on  which  Napoleon  is  said  to  have  written  his  letter 
to  the  Emperor  of  Germany  has  been  brought  there,  with  the 
veritable  quill,  the  veritable  tin  ink  horn  in  which  he  dipped 
it,  the  veritable  sand  with  which  he  dried  his  letter  and  the 
veritable  receptacle  for  water  in  which  he  left  the  quill  when 
he  had  finished.  A  high,  slender-backed  chair,  like  a  piece 
of  pulpit  furniture,  whereon  he  is  reputed  to  have  sat — and 
napped — is  treasured  in  a  glass  ease,  and  above  it  are  a  nobby 
chapeau  and  a  sword  and  scabbard  crossed.  They  belonged 
to  Desaix,  but  presumably  were  not  worn  in  the  battle,  for 
Savary  records  that  ghouls  had  stolen  everything  on  him  and 
stripped  him  naked  before  his  body  was  cold. 

Out  in  a  pretty  park — there  are  260  acres  in  the  reserva- 
tion— is  a  marble  bust  of  the  fallen  General  in  the  midst  of  a 


MARENGO  LOST  AND  WON 

leafy  solitude,  his  shoulders,  chin,  cheeks,  and  brow  black  with 
the  scribbled  Italian  names  of  visitors.  A  lovely  belvedere 
rises  in  the  shade  of  great  trees,  an  altar  against  its  inner  wall. 
Through  an  opening  in  the  centre  of  the  floor,  a  heap  of  bones 
surprises  the  gaze. 

There  in  that  pit  are  gathered  the  relics  of  the  slain  in  a 
common  pile,  where  the  boys  of  France  and  the  boys  of  Aus- 
tria are  mingling  their  dust  as  they  mingled  their  blood  in 
the  creek  on  the  plain. 

Out  of  the  grave  of  that  mute  brotherhood  of  death,  came 
peace,  the  first  that  a  war-worn  world  had  known  since  monar- 
chical Europe  combined  against  the  French  Revolution  eight 
years  before.  Austria  was  ready  to  lay  down  her  arms  at 
Napoleon's  feet,  but  her  ally,  Great  Britain,  whose  battlefield 
was  the  sea,  had  not  felt  the  heavy  hand  of  the  conqueror. 
If  she  gave  him  peace  on  the  water  he  would  be  able  to  rein- 
force his  army  in  Egypt  and  keep  his  foothold  in  the  east. 

The  British,  therefore,  sent  the  Austriaus  an  extra  subsidy 
for  the  continuance  of  the  campaign  against  France  in  Ger- 
many, which,  however,  was  brought  to  a  disastrous  end  by 
General  Moreau  in  a  great  French  victory  at  Hohenlinden  in 
the  December  following  Marengo. 

Napoleon  now  showed  hardly  less  skill  in  the  game  of 
diplomacy  than  in  the  game  of  war.  He  made  his  moves  like 
an  adept  chessman.  He  brought  Austria  to  harder  terms  than 
he  had  imposed  at  Campo  Formio  three  years  before,  closed 
an  ugly  quarrel  with  the  United  States,  made  a  trade  with 
Spain  for  Louisiana  and  promoted  a  feud  between  Russia  and 
the  Baltic  powers  against  Great  Britain,  which  broke  out  into 
a  naval  war,  culminating  in  the  Battle  of  Copenhagen. 

The  British,  with  a  population  of  17,000,000,  found  them- 
selves abandoned  and  alone  in  the  long  struggle  with  France, 
which  now  numbered  40,000,000  people.  Since  the  war  be- 
gan in  1792,  the  expenditures  of  Great  Britain  had  risen  from 
$100,000,000  a  year  to  $300,000,000;  the  income  tax  had 
been  raised  to  ten  per  cent,  and  the  national  debt  stood  at 
$2,750,000,000. 

Beneath  those  accumulated  burdens,  England  welcomed  the 


134     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON  ^ 

relief  that  peace  would  bring,  although  looking  upon  it  as  ^ 

hardly  more  than  a  brief  truce,  an  experimental  peace,  as  her 
statesmen  described  it.  She  did  not  yield,  however,  until  the 
French  had  lost  Egypt  and  until  she  herself  had  little  to  lose 
from  a  breathing  spell. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE  LAW  GIVER 

IP  Napoleon  never  had  fought  a  battle,  he  would  yet  stand 
forth  as  one  of  the  world's  greatest  statesmen.  "Where, 
indeed,  shall  we  look  for  his  peer  in  statecraft? 

Laying  aside  his  sword  after  the  Battle  of  Marengo,  he  won 
in  four  years  of  peace,  victories  which  deserve  to  be  no  less 
renowned  than  those  of  war,  and  which  were  far  more  en- 
during. Entering  upon  the  Consulate  in  the  true  spirit  of  a 
patriot  and  servant  of  the  people,  the  greatness  and  glory  of 
his  country  were  his  ruling  passion.  "Ma  belle  France,"  as 
he  fondly  called  her,  was  his  mistress. 

He  would  rather  toil  for  the  nation  than  sleep  or  eat.  He 
could  work  eighteen  hours  without  resting.  "I  work  all  the 
time,"  he  said  to  the  official  sluggards,  "at  dinner  and  at  the 
theatre. ' ' 

Generally  men  are  grown  old  and  stale  by  the  time  they 
attain  to  power.  It  was  this  man's  fortune  while  yet  in  the 
full  flush  of  youthful  enthusiasm  to  find  himself  the  ruler  of 
France.  He  held  his  councillors  to  their  tasks  from  nine  to 
five,  with  only  fifteen  minutes'  intermission  for  eating,  and 
again  from  ten  at  night  until  five  in  the  morning.  "Come, 
come,"  he  chided  his  exhausted  helpers  far  in  the  night,  "let 
us  bestir  ourselves.  It  is  only  two  o'clock,  and  we  must  earn 
the  money  the  French  people  pay  us."  If  Bourrienne  stole 
away  to  the  theatre  he  had  to  come  back  to  take  up  the  day's 
duties  again. 

Napoleon  did  not  take  time  properly  to  undress  for  bed,  but 
tore  ofiP  his  clothes  and  flung  them  about  the  room,  hat,  watch 
and  all.  He  did  not  stop  even  to  be  shaved,  but  talked,  read 
papers  and  kept  on  the  move  while  under  the  razor  of  Con- 
stant, his  valet.     He  held  audiences  while  in  the  bathtub. 

His  servants  had  to  go  into  conference  and   agree  upon 

135 


136     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

measures  for  getting  him  eorrectl}^  dressed  for  state  occasions. 
He  refused  to  pause  for  sittings  to  the  great  Canova,  whom 
he  had  summoned  from  Italy,  but  obliged  the  sculptor  to 
study  him  while  he  lunched. 

And  he  would  not  spare  the  time  to  eat.  A  glass  of  hot 
water,  in  which  he  squeezed  a  lemon,  sufficed  for  his  break- 
fast. The  table  bored  him,  and  his  chef,  never  knowing  when 
he  would  yield  to  the  need  of  nourishment,  kept  his  luncheon 
ready  and  waiting  for  him  hour  after  hour,  replacing  the 
food  in  the  oven  as  fast  as  it  was  cooked  with  a  new  supply. 
When  he  came  at  last  he  chose  only  one  of  nine  or  ten  dishes 
and  ignored  the  rest.     He  hardly  knew  what  he  ate. 

Often  when  he  had  staj^ed  only  ten  minutes,  even  at  dinner, 
he  pushed  his  chair  back  and  left  the  family  and  his  guests  at 
the  table.  Once  when  something  troubled  him,  instead  of 
springing  up  from  the  table  as  usual,  he  hurled  it  away  from 
him,  upsetting  the  dishes  on  the  floor. 

When  he  wrote  he  did  not  take  time  to  form  the  letters,  but 
left  half  of  them  out  of  the  longer  words.  "He  writes  like 
a  cat  scratching  holes  in  a  sheet  of  paper,"  his  brother  Joseph 
said.  His  thoughts  outraced  his  quill,  which  he  wiped  on 
his  white  breeches,  necessitating  a  fresh  pair  every  morning. 
He  insisted  that  "a  man  occupied  with  public  business  can- 
not practise  orthography.  His  ideas  must  flow  faster  than 
his  hand  can  trace." 

His  dictation  poured  forth  in  a  torrent,  which  brooked  no 
interference  and  could  not  be  turned  back  for  the  repetition 
of  a  sentence  or  a  word.  There  was  yet  no  shorthand  system, 
and  to  keep  up  with  him  his  scribes  had  to  invent  one  of  their 
own.  While  he  dictated  he  strode  up  and  down  the  room 
like  a  caged  lion.  If  he  sat  down  his  tireless  hand  hacked  at 
the  arm  of  his  chair  with  a  penknife,  or  he  dangled  his  legs 
from  his  secretary's  table  and  rocked  it  so  hard  the  poor  man 
had  still  greater  difficulty  in  making  his  notes. 

The  infinite  range  of  his  interests  and  the  tremendous  dis- 
play of  his  energies  stagger  the  imagination,  and  "surpassed 
human  capacity,"  in  the  words  of  Taine,  his  severest  critic  in 
literature,  while  Emerson  has  said  that  "his  achievement  of 


THE  LAW  GIVER  137 

business  was  immense  and  enlarges  the  known  powers  of 
man." 

His  ministers,  overwhelmed  by  his  instructions  and  pumped 
dry  by  his  questioning,  went  from  the  Tuileries  to  their  of- 
fices only  to  find  on  their  desks  a  dozen  more  written  inquiries 
from  him.  Lavallette  said  that  "he  governed  more  in  three 
years  than  kings  in  100  years." 

He  boasted  that  he  took  more  pleasure  in  reading  official 
reports  "than  any  young  girl  does  in  a  novel."  He  got  up 
at  two  in  the  morning  to  study  army  reports  while  stretched 
on  his  sofa  before  the  fire — and  detected  twenty  mistakes  in 
them! 

His  own  explanation  of  the  mechanics  of  his  mind  is  as 
good  as  it  is  familiar:  "Various  subjects  and  affairs  are 
stowed  away  in  my  brain  as  in  a  chest  of  drawers.  When  I 
take  up  any  special  business  I  shut  one  drawer  and  open  an- 
other. None  of  them  ever  get  mixed,  and  never  does  this 
incommode  me  or  fatigue  me.  When  I  feel  sleepy,  I  shut  all 
the  drawers  and  fall  asleep." 

Yet  this  Titan  did  not  really  have  great  phj^sical  vigour. 
He  was  seldom  well,  often  in  pain  and  he  generally  awoke  in 
the  morning  unrefreshed  and  depressed.  He  was  subject  to 
dizziness,  nervous  spasms  and  fainting  spells,  which  led  to 
the  suspicion  that  he  was  epileptic  like  Cgesar,  Mahomet  and 
some  other  great  geniuses  in  history. 

Under  Napoleon  the  government  ceased  to  be  a  government 
by  faction,  and  France  no  longer  was  a  prey  to  the  bitter 
strife  between  the  ins  and  the  outs.  He  coined  for  the  new 
era  that  alluring  watchword,  ' '  a  career  open  to  every  talent, ' ' 
and  rightly  calculated  that  "nobody  is  interested  in  over- 
throwing a  government  in  which  all  the  deserving  are  em- 
ployed. ' ' 

When  the  task  of  organising  the  nation  suddenly  fell  to 
him  he  knew  almost  no  one  in  the  country  except  soldiers. 
He  had  to  spy  out  statesmen  as  he  had  spied  out  the  lay  of 
the  land  in  his  military  campaigns  in  strange  countries.  He 
prospected  for  human  gifts  as  another  might  prospect  for  gold 
mines. 


138  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

His  eye  and  his  intuition  seldom  deceived  him,  and  men 
soon  lost  their  courage  to  try  to  foist  a  knave  upon  him.  All 
stood  in  terror  of  his  glance,  which  shot  through  them  like 
an  X-ray,  and  a  foreign  diplomat  is  said  to  have  adopted  col- 
oured glasses  to  screen  his  soul  from  that  searching  gaze. 

Once  he  had  chosen  he  held  to  men  while  a  shred  of  them 
remained,  and  hore  with  mediocrity  and  even  betrayal  be- 
yond the  point  where  patience  in  a  ruler  ceases  to  be  a  virtue. 
He  framed  for  himself  the  motto,  "There  is  no  fool  that  is 
not  good  for  something;  there  is  no  intelligence  equal  to 
everything."  Men  rated  as  incompetent  surprised  their 
friends  with  the  latent  abilities  which  he  drew  out  of  them. 
* '  I  have  a  lucky  hand, ' '  he  chuckled.  ' '  Those  on  whom  I  lay 
it  become  fit  for  anything." 

His  great  passion  was  to  reunite  the  French  people  of  all 
classes  and,  regardless  of  their  past  differences,  to  call  into 
the  government  the  ablest  men  in  the  nation.  He  found 
145,000  Frenchmen  in  exile  as  aristocrats  or  priests,  while 
300,000  were  living  on  sufferance  at  home,  deprived  of  all 
civic  rights.  He  restored  the  rights  of  the  latter  and  recalled 
the  former  from  their  banishment. 

Summoning  to  the  Tuileries  a  village  priest,  the  most  stub- 
born opponent  of  the  Republic  in  rebellious  and  Bourbon 
Vendee,  he  won  him  over  at  a  word  and  made  him  a  mediator 
between  the  state  and  the  church.  While  never  much  of  a 
churchman  himself,  he  determined  to  make  peace  with  the 
Papacy  and  he  bade  his  ambassador  at  Rome  to  "treat  the 
Pope  as  if  he  had  200,000  soldiers. ' ' 

All  this  was  galling  to  the  spirit  of  the  revolutionists,  for 
the  Republic  and  the  Pope  had  been  engaged  for  years  in  a 
bitter  warfare,  and  the  Holy  See  had  been  active  in  the  coali- 
tions against  France.  "I  found  it  more  difficult,"  Napoleon 
said,  "to  restore  religion  than  to  win  battles." 

Already  the  church  bells  were  heard  after  a  silence  of 
years,  and  as  Napoleon  was  walking  with  councillor  Thibau- 
deau  in  the  garden  of  ]Malraaison,  he  stopped  and  said, 
"Listen  to  me:  Last  Sunday  I  was  walking  here  alone  when 
I  heard  the  church  bells  of  Reuil.     I  was  moved  by  the  sound, 


THE  LAW  GIVER  139 

so  strong  is  the  power  of  early  association.  I  said  to  myself, 
if  such  a  man  as  I  am  can  be  affected  in  this  way,  how  deep 
must  be  the  impression  on  simple,  believing  souls.  ...  A 
nation  must  have  a  religion.  ...  I  do  not  believe  in  any  re- 
ligion, but  when  it  comes  to  speaking  of  God" — and  he 
pointed  to  the  heavens — "AVho  made  all  that?" 

"All  moral  systems  are  fine,"  he  said  again;  "but  the  Gos- 
pel alone  has  shown  a  full  and  complete  assemblage  of  the 
principles  of  morality,  stripped  of  all  absurdity.  .  .  .  Do  you 
wish  to  find  the  really  sublime?     Repeat  the  Lord's  prayer." 

It  was,  of  course,  as  a  statesman  and  not  as  an  individual 
that  he  sought  the  reunion  of  the  church  with  her  "eldest 
daughter,"  France,  coldly  arguing:  "Society  cannot  exist 
without  inequality  of  fortunes  and  inequality  of  fortunes  can- 
not exist  without  religion.  When  a  man  is  dying  of  hunger 
by  the  side  of  one  who  gormandizes,  it  is  impossible  for  him 
to  agree  to  the  difference  unless  there  be  some  authority  to 
say  to  him,  '  God  wills  it  so ;  there  must  be  poor  and  rich  in 
this  world;  but  afterward  and  during  eternity  the  division 
will  be  made  otherwise.'  "  He  reduced  religion  to  the  same 
base  use  and  gave  it  the  same  earthy,  economic  motive  when 
he  said  that  it  "prevents  the  rich  from  destroying  the  poor." 

At  the  invitation  of  the  First  Consul,  the  papal  secretary 
of  state,  Cardinal  Consalvi,  came  to  Paris,  and  the  celebrated 
Concordat  was  drawn  up,  a  treaty  destined  to  continue  in 
force  through  all  the  vicissitudes  of  a  century,  and  not  to  be 
abrogated  until  1905.  By  the  terms  of  the  Concordat  the 
Catholic  religion  was  recognised  as  the  religion,  not  of  the 
state,  but  of  a  great  majority  of  the  people  and  of  the  Con- 
suls. On  the  other  hand,  the  church  consented  to  reduce  its 
sees  in  France  by  more  than  one-half  and  permit  the  French 
government  to  nominate  all  bishops  for  the  approval  of  the 
Pope,  while  the  bishops  in  turn  were  to  nominate  all  priests 
for  the  approval  of  the  government.  The  church  also  gave 
a  quitclaim  deed  to  the  purchasers  of  the  estates  that  had 
been  taken  away  from  it  in  the  Revolution,  and  the  govern- 
ment in  return  pledged  itself  to  give  the  bishops  and  priests 
a  fitting  maintenance. 


140     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Another  and  generally  welcome  effect  of  the  Concordat  was 
the  restoration  of  Sunday.  Sunday  had  been  abolished  by 
the  republican  calendar,  which  provided  in  its  place  a  day  of 
rest  each  tenth  day.  Some  wit  had  proved  the  folly  of  that 
attempt  to  change  the  settled  habits  of  mankind  when  he  said 
the  new  calendar  would  '  *  have  to  fight  two  enemies  who  never 
yield,  the  beard  and  the  shirt ; ' '  for  ten  days  surely  was  too 
long  to  wait  for  the  weekly  shave  and  change  of  linen. 

Letizia  was  the  happiest  of  the  Bonapartes  at  the  thought 
of  the  return  to  mother  church.  "Now  I  need  not  box  your 
ears,"  she  said  to  Napoleon,  "as  I  used  to  in  order  to  make 
you  go  to  mass."  He  had  not  forgotten  her  half-brother  in 
his  negotiations  with  the  church,  the  uncle  who  taught  him 
the  alphabet ;  Joseph  Fesch,  having  re-entered  ecclesiastical 
life,  was  to  be  Archbishop  of  Lyons  and  a  cardinal. 

The  two  achievements  of  his  Consulate  that  gave  Napoleon 
the  most  pride  was  his  restoration  of  the  "fallen  altars,"  as 
he  said,  and  the  adoption  of  the  Code  Napoleon,  through 
which,  as  he  boasted,  "I  have  hallowed  the  Revolution  by 
infusing  it  into  our  laws.  My  code  is  the  sheet  anchor  which 
will  save  France,  and  entitle  me  to  the  benedictions  of  pos- 
terity." 

He  early  set  a  committee  of  his  council  of  state  at  work 
drafting  and  codifying  the  laws,  and  he  remorselessly  held 
them  to  the  task  until  they  had  fashioned  more  than  two  thou- 
sand articles  into  a  Code.  This  body  of  laws  was  framed  to 
meet  every  conceivable  occasion  in  the  intercourse  of  a  civil- 
ised community,  every  question  that  could  arise  between  men 
in  business,  in  the  home,  in  the  street. 

Towering  above  his  battle  monuments  and  his  arches  of 
triumph,  the  Code  stands  to  this  day  the  greatest  and  most 
enduring  single  achievement  associated  with  the  name  of 
Napoleon.  It  was  the  granite  foundation  on  which  he  reared 
a  new  France  amid  the  smoking  ruins  of  the  old  institutions 
that  the  Revolution  had  destroyed,  a  France  that  has  with- 
stood the  winds  and  floods  of  a  stormy  century,  because  it  was 
founded  on  the  rock  of  law  and  order. 

The  tottering  nation  no  sooner  had  evoked  the  mighty  arm 


THE  LAW  GIVER  141 

of  Napoleon  as  its  crutch,  and  France  no  sooner  leaned  upon 
it  than  she  was  filled  with  dread  forebodings  of  what  would 
happen  when  it  should  be  withdrawn  from  her  support. 
Would  the  Terror  or  the  Bourbons  return?  The  aristocrats 
and  the  church  looked  upon  him  as  their  only  shield  from  the 
former,  while  the  revolutionists  and  the  peasant  landowners 
regarded  him  as  their  protector  from  the  latter. 

He  himself  was  well  warranted  in  declaring  that  '*  except 
for  a  few  lunatics  who  care  for  nothing  but  anarchy  and  a 
few  honest  men  who  dream  of  a  spartan  republic,  the  whole 
nation  is  crying  out  for  a  strong  and  stable  government." 
Not  merely  the  placeholders  felt  their  dependence  on  him, 
but  all  who  were  sharing  in  the  new  security  and  prosperity 
of  a  flourishing  national  business  found  themselves  limited  in 
their  calculations  to  his  ten-year  term ;  then  the  abyss ! 

The  First  Consul  was  hardly  in  office  before  a  movement 
began  to  lengthen  his  term  to  twenty  years,  but  the  proposal 
was  immediately  amended  and  his  election  for  life  was  pro- 
vided instead,  with  authority  to  nominate  his  successor.  He 
himself  struck  out  this  last  provision,  for  he  was  still  argu- 
ing that  "heredity  is  irreconcilable  with  the  principle  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people  and  impossible  in  France." 

There  was  only  one  vote  against  the  Consulate  for  life  in  the 
Tribunate  and  that  was  cast  by  Carnot.  Napoleon  was  wise 
in  insisting  on  having  the  law  submitted  to  a  referendum  of 
the  voters,  who  indorsed  it  with  a  unanimity  amazing  to 
English  speaking  people:  Yes,  3,568,885  votes;  no,  8374. 

The  First  Consul  for  Life,  with  an  annual  allowance  from 
the  treasury  of  $1,200,000,  felt  himself  a  King  in  all  but  the 
crown.  His  thirty-third  birthday  was  celebrated  with  the 
pomp  and  gaiety  which  Paris  so  well  knows  how  to  display, 
and  on  the  tower  of  Notre  Dame  there  blazed  through  the 
night  a  great  fiery  star,  the  star  of  Napoleon's  destiny. 

Dropping  the  signature  of  Bonaparte,  he  began  to  sign  his 
Christian  name.  Napoleon,  after  the  manner  of  a  royal  per- 
sonage. He  fairly  clapped  his  hands,  this  giant  sprung  from 
the  loins  of  the  people,  as  he  thought  of  himself  on  an  equality 
with  the  crowned  pigmies  of  Europe:     "I  am  on  a  level  now 


142 


IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 


with  foreign  sovereigns.  They,  like  me,  are  rulers  for  their 
lifetime  only.  They  and  their  ministers  will  have  much 
higher  respect  for  me  now. ' '  The  Cisalpine  Republic  in  Italy 
also  called  him  to  its  presidency. 

Among  the  dissenters  from  the  life  Consulate  was  Lafa- 
yette, who  wrote  on  the  election  register  that  he  could  not  vote 
for  an  unlimited  magistracy  unless  political  liberty  was  guar- 
anteed. The  patriotic  Marquis  appealed  in  a  letter  directly 
to  the  First  Consul:  "It  is  impossible  that  you.  General,  the 
foremost  in  the  ranks  of  those  great  men  who  are  but  rarely 
found  throughout  the  ages,  should  desire  that  such  a  revolu- 
tion as  ours,  so  many  victims,  so  much  bloodshed,  such  mis- 
fortunes, such  prodigies,  should  terminate  in  the  establish- 
ment of  an  arbitrary  regime." 

On  reading  that  communication,  Napoleon  contemptuously 
exclaimed:  ** Always  thinking  of  Washington,"  and  dis- 
missed the  writer  from  his  thoughts  as  "a  political  ninny," 
"an  idealogue, "  who  is  "constantly  harping  on  America 
without  understanding  that  the  French  are  not  Americans." 
It  was  Lafayette's  last  effort  to  preserve  the  Revolution,  and 
he  entered  into  a  retirement  from  which  he  did  not  emerge 
while  Napoleon  remained  in  power. 

Might  he  have  made  himself  a  Washington  instead  of  a 
Caesar?  It  is  hard  to  say.  Against  factions  at  home  and 
foes  abroad  even  the  power  of  Napoleon  might  not  have 
availed  to  make  France,  with  its  traditions  of  royalty  and 
ignorance  of  free  institutions,  a  true  republic.  But  how 
glorious  would  have  been  his  failure! 


CHAPTER  XVin 

SELLING  LOUISIANA 

1803     AGE  34 

THE  Consulate  of  Napoleon  had  a  more  important  and 
lasting  effect  on  the  United  States,  a  country  3000 
miles  away  from  the  French  shore,  than  on  even  the 
next  door  neighbours  of  France. 

The  people  of  the  New  World  are  likely  to  think  of  them- 
selves as  having  been  mere  lookers-on  at  the  great  drama  of 
Napoleon's  life,  with  a  vast  ocean  between  them  and  the 
theatre  of  his  activities.  But  even  the  Atlantic  was  not  a 
moat  broad  enough  to  separate  them  entirely  from  his  for- 
tunes and  misfortunes. 

The  earliest  treaty  made  by  the  First  Consul  was  a  treaty 
of  peace  and  friendship  with  the  United  States,  which  was 
concluded  by  Joseph  Bonaparte  on  September  30,  1800,  The 
event  was  celebrated  with  brilliant  fetes  at  Joseph's  country 
estate,  Mortefontaine,  near  Chantilly,  in  the  Parisian  suburbs, 
where  at  an  elaborate  banquet  of  180  covers,  the  First  Consul 
toasted  "the  manes  of  the  French  and  Americans  who  died 
on  the  -field  of  battle  for  the  independence  of  the  New  World. ' ' 

The  Americans  present  would  have  been  sorely  distracted 
from  the  pleasures  of  that  feast  at  Mortefontaine  had  they 
known  that  within  twenty-four  hours  the  conqueror  of  Italy 
and  Egypt  was  secretly  to  conclude  a  treaty  with  Spain  which 
would  make  him  the  next  door  neighbour  of  Uncle  Sam.  By 
swapping  a  little  Italian  kingdom  for  the  vast  territory  of 
Louisiana,  the  First  Consul  became  the  possessor  of  more 
square  miles  of  American  soil  than  the  United  States  held  and 
also  became  the  master  of  the  greatest  river  of  North  America. 

143 


144     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

When,  on  March  4,  1801,  Thomas  Jefferson  was  inaugurated 
third  President  of  the  United  States,  he  in  common  with  all 
his  countrymen  was  still  ignorant  of  the  existence  of  that 
hidden  treaty  of  II  Defenso,  which  had  been  made  on  the  first 
day  of  the  preceding  October.  At  the  first  rumour  of  it  the 
President  and  his  cabinet  were  greatly  disturbed,  while  a 
spirit  of  warlike  resistance  flamed  up  in  the  breasts  of  the 
Kentuckians  and  of  the  other  frontier  dwellers  in  the  Missis- 
sippi valley. 

"Nothing  perhaps  since  the  Revolution,"  Jefferson  wrote, 
"has  produced  more  uneasy  sensations,"  and  he  instructed 
Robert  R.  Livingston,  the  American  minister  at  Paris,  boldly 
to  say  to  the  French  government: 

''There  is  on  the  globe  one  single  spot  the  possessor  of  which  is  our 
natural  enemy.  It  is  New  Orleans.  .  .  .  The  clay  France  takes  pos- 
session of  New  Oi'leans  fixes  the  sentence  which  is  to  restrain  her 
within  her  low-water  mark.  It  seals  the  union  of  the  two  nations 
which,  in  conjunction,  can  maintain  exclusive  possession  of  the  ocean. 
From  that  moment  we  must  many  oui-selves  to  the  British  fleet  and 
nation." 

Nor  did  the  Commander-in-chief  of  an  army  of  3000 
soldiers  and  of  a  navy  of  seven  warships  pause  even  there  in 
his  challenge  to  the  victor  of  IMarengo,  but  added  that  "the 
first  cannon  which  shall  be  fired  in  Europe"  will  be  "the  sig- 
nal for  tearing  up  any  settlement  made  by  France  in 
America."  A  member  of  Napoleon's  cabinet  truly  remarked 
that  if  any  European  power  had  dared  to  address  such  lan- 
guage to  the  First  Consul,  the  words  would  have  been  an- 
swered only  with  guns.  Happily,  even  the  Little  Corporal's 
24-pounders  could  not  shoot  across  the  Atlantic. 

Fortunately  no  other  man  in  America  better  understood 
European  politics  than  the  then  President.  While  Napoleon 
went  ahead  with  his  project  for  planting  himself  at  the  mouth 
of  the  IMississippi  river,  Jefferson  prepared  for  the  inevitable 
outbreak  of  a  new  war  between  France  and  England.  Nearly 
six  months  before  the  rupture  which  he  foresaw,  he  proposed 
to  Congress  that  a  special  mission  be  sent  to  Paris,  and  James 
Monroe  was  chosen  as  the  commissioner. 


SELLING  LOUISIANA  145 

Even  while  Monroe  was  on  the  sea,  George  III  called  out 
the  British  militia  and  Napoleon  stormed  at  the  British  am- 
bassador. At  last  when  the  American  envoy,  in  a  post  chaise, 
was  hurrying  on  from  Havre  to  the  capital,  Napoleon  an- 
nounced to  two  of  his  ministers  that  not  a  moment  was  to  be 
lost  in  selling  Louisiana  to  the  United  States  before  the  im- 
pending war  should  burst  upon  him,  when  the  territory  surely 
would  be  lost  to  France.  In  vain  his  minister  of  marine, 
Decres,  protested  that  New  Orleans  was  a  second  Alexandria, 
that  it  could  be  made  more  important  than  any  other  port  on 
the  globe  and  certainly  would  be  of  inestimable  value  when 
a  canal  across  Panama  should  be  constructed. 

Far  into  the  night  the  three  men  debated  at  St.  Cloud  the 
destiny  of  Louisiana.  After  only  a  brief  rest,  they  met  again 
at  daybreak,  when  Napoleon,  in  his  dressing  gown  and  with 
his  lap  full  of  newly  arrived  London  despatches,  pronounced 
the  fate  of  the  great  empire.  It  must  be  sold  at  once  or  it 
would  be  snatched  from  France  without  any  compensation. 

After  two  weeks  of  chaffering  over  the  biggest  land  trans- 
action in  history  the  entire  parcel  was  sold  to  the  Ameri- 
cans for  $11,250,000  cash  and  a  remission  of  spoliation  claims 
against  France  to  the  amount  of  $3,750,000,  or  a  total  of 
$15,000,000.  One  shearing  of  sheep  in  the  states  of  the  Lou- 
isiana purchase  now  would  suffice  to  pay  the  original  price  of 
those  more  than  eight  hundred  thousand  square  miles. 

On  the  very  day  Napoleon  ratified  the  Louisiana  treaty, 
there  began  that  war  between  France  and  England  which 
closed  only  at  Waterloo  twelve  years  afteins'ard.  As  he 
parted  with  a  territory  vaster  than  his  sword  ever  was  to  con- 
quer, he  consoled  himself  with  the  reflection  that  he  had  aided 
a  competitor  of  the  English  on  the  sea,  a  competitor  who, 
sooner  or  later,  he  confidently  predicted  would  humble  their 
pride.  When  the  negotiations  were  concluded,  and  he  con- 
templated the  huge  area  that  he  had  fairly  thrust  upon  the 
American  envoys,  who  had  been  charged  to  buy  only  the  few 
acres  comprised  within  the  limits  of  New  Orleans,  he  chuckled, 
"They  asked  me  for  a  town  and  I  have  given  them  an  em- 
pire." 


146  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  last  scene  in  the  drama  of  the  Louisiana  sale  was  en- 
acted in  the  Place  d'Armes  at  New  Orleans  the  week  before 
Christmas  in  the  year  1803. 

For  60,000,000  francs  in  hand.  Napoleon  opened  the 
Tchoupitoulas  gate  of  the  town.  A  little  force  of  American 
soldiers,  under  General  Wilkinson,  marched  in  and  drew  up 
before  the  old  Cabildo,  which  still  rises  by  the  cathedral  of 
St.  Louis  in  the  Place  d'Armes,  now  Jackson  Square.  The 
treaty  of  cession  was  read  aloud  to  the  people  in  French  and 
English,  whereupon  Laussat,  the  commissioner,  standing  on 
the  balcony  of  the  Cabildo,  read  his  credentials  from  Napo- 
leon Bonaparte,  First  Consul  of  France,  and  Governor  Clai- 
borne of  the  IMississippi  territory  read  his  credentials  from 
Thomas  Jefferson,  President  of  the  LTnited  States.  Laussat 
then  surrendered  to  Claiborne  the  keys  of  New  Orleans  and 
exchanged  chairs  with  him. 

The  red,  white,  and  blue  banner  of  France,  which  had 
floated  over  New  Orleans  for  only  twenty  days,  was  slowly 
lowered  on  the  flagstaff  as  the  red,  white,  and  blue  of  the 
American  Union  was  hoisted.  Midway  of  the  pole,  both  flags 
paused  for  a  fraternal  moment  to  mingle  their  folds,  while 
the  trumpets  sounded  and  the  drums  rolled.  The  stars  and 
stripes  then  ascended  to  the  top  to  receive  the  salute  of  the 
artillery^men  and  musketrymen  and  the  tricolour  to  the  bottom 
reverently  to  be  received  in  the  arms  of  fifty  Louisianians,  vet- 
erans of  the  army  of  France,  who  had  gathered  from  distant 
settlements  to  pay  homage  to  the  last  banner  of  the  country 
of  Champlain,  Marquette,  La  Salle  and  Montcalm  to  wave  in 
sovereignty  above  a  spot  of  earth  on  the  continent  of  North 
America. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON 

FRANCE  joyed  in  the  Consulate  as  the  glorious  sum- 
mer that  followed  her  long  winter  of  discontent. 
It  was  the  wondrous  healing  time  for  the  wounds  of 
the  Revolution.  While  Napoleon  welcomed  home  the  long- 
proscribed  aristocrats  and  priests,  he  dispelled  the  fears  of 
the  republican  masses  by  confirming  them  forever  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  property  which  the  Revolution  had  taken  from 
the  aristocracy  and  the  church,  and  sold  to  them. 

The  world  was  young  again.  Fortune  had  shuffled  the 
cards  and  fame  was  dealing  new  hands  all  round.  Youth 
was  in  the  saddle.  The  private  soldier  and  the  stable  boys  of 
yesterday,  when  they  had  hardly  a  shirt  and  a  half  between 
them,  suddenly  found  their  peasant  names  glorified  and 
eclipsing  the  lustre  of  the  dukes  and  marquises  and  counts 
of  the  ancient  nobility. 

No  other  hand  than  Napoleon's  ever  lifted  so  great  a  legion 
of  people  out  of  obscurity  into  position,  out  of  poverty  into 
affluence.  For  this  man,  who  faced  the  world  with  a  heart 
of  ice,  never  ceased  to  take  a  boyish  pride  and  pleasure  in 
sharing  his  fortunes  with  all  who  had  known  him  in  his 
poorer  days.  He  hunted  up  the  outcast  friars  of  the  over- 
thrown school  at  Brienne  and  conferred  offices  and  pensions 
on  them,  bestowing  a  snug  annuity  on  even  his  writing  teacher, 
who  surely  had  small  claim  to  the  gratitude  of  so  wretched  a 
penman.  His  teachers  at  the  Ecole  in  Paris  also  were  gen- 
erously remembered,  while  a  shower  of  favours  fell  upon  his 
old  neighbours  in  Corsica  and  upon  all  in  Valence  and  Au- 
xonne  who  had  bestowed  a  friendly  nod  upon  the  starveling 
lieutenant  when  he  was  stationed  in  those  towns. 

He  appointed  to  the  post  of  conservator  of  waters  and  for- 

147 


148  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ests  the  mountaineer  who  led  the  band  of  men  that  rescued 
Mother  Letizia  from  the  Ajaccio  mob.  He  pensioned 
Camilla  Ilari,  his  old  foster  mother,  the  fisherman's  wife 
of  Ajaccio,  and  would  gladly  have  carried  her  son,  his  foster 
brother  and  playmate,  along  with  him,  had  the  young  man 
not  run  away  and  joined  the  British  navy.  He  brought  his 
foster  sister  to  Paris  and  introduced  her  in  his  court  to 
"show  what  beautiful  girls  Corsica  raises;"  he  married  her  off 
to  her  advantage  and  stood  godfather  to  her  baby  boy. 

A  caller  from  Valence  was  questioned  about  every  one  in 
the  place  and  particularly  about  the  woman  who  kept  the 
"Three  Pigeons"  in  the  Rue  PeroUerie,  where  Second  Lieu- 
tenant Bonaparte  used  to  eat  his  one  meal  a  day.  Learning 
she  was  still  living,  Napoleon  sent  her  $200  for  fear,  he  said, 
that  he  might  not  have  paid  her  for  all  his  cups  of  coffee. 

One  of  the  first  debts  of  gratitude  he  discharged  was  in 
favour  of  the  man  who  had  given  him  the  desk  in  the  war  of- 
fice where  he  had  the  opportunity  to  draw  up  his  plan  of 
campaign  in  Italy.  "When  the  old  official  responded  to  the 
summons,  the  First  Consul  said  with  a  smile  that  refliected 
his  pleasure :     ' '  You  are  a  senator ! ' ' 

"I  was  at  Toulon,"  was  the  magic  password  at  the  palace 
door  for  army  men,  and  even  Carteaux,  the  painter-General 
who  had  laughed  at  Captain  Bonaparte,  was  placed  on  the 
pension  rolls.  An  old  nobleman  who  had  lent  the  impecuni- 
ous father  of  the  First  Consul  $125  and,  of  course,  had  never 
been  repaid,  was  in  exile  and  poverty.  "Bourrienne,"  Na- 
poleon said,  with  real  emotion,  as  he  held  in  his  hand  the  ap- 
pealing letter  from  the  creditor,  "this  is  sacred.  Send  the 
old  man  ten  times  the  amount  of  the  debt  and  have  his  name 
erased  from  the  list  of  the  banished." 

Raguideau,  Josephine's  candid  lawyer,  who  had  advised 
her  against  marrying  a  man  with  nothing  but  a  sword  and  a 
cloak,  received  a  lucrative  post. 

Even  the  humble  shopkeepers,  who  had  given  him  credit 
when  he  needed  it,  were  honoured  with  patronage  in  prefer- 
ence to  more  fashionable  and  prosperous  tradesmen.  The 
obscure  cobbler  who  made  his  shoes  when  he  was  at  the  Ecole, 


A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON  149 

became  the  proud  bootmaker  for  the  First  Consul  of  France. 
Des  Mazis,  his  one  intimate  among  the  pupils  at  the  Ecole, 
the  youth  who  lent  the  penniless  Corsican  the  money  to  take 
him  to  his  regiment  at  Valence,  was  in  exile  as  an  aristocrat, 
but  was  recalled  and  received  an  important  office. 

The  steadily  increasing  pageantry  of  the  Consulate  was 
outshining  the  ceremonials  of  royalty,  and  a  presentation  to 
Napoleon  and  Josephine  was  more  coveted  than  an  introduc- 
tion to  the  Hapsburgs,  the  Hohenzollerns  or  the  Guelphs. 
The  new  court  was  free  from  the  scandals  and  stiffness  of  the 
old  courts.  Not  only  was  there  opened  under  the  Consulate 
a  career  for  every  talent,  but  for  every  grace  as  well. 
Beauty  no  less  than  ability  had  a  fair  field  and  no  favour. 

Although  when  Napoleon  went  to  take  up  his  residence  in 
the  Tuileries,  most  of  the  dignitaries  in  the  procession  had 
to  ride  in  street  cabs  with  pieces  of  paper  pasted  over  the 
license  numbers,  and  there  was  hardly  a  suit  of  livery  left  in 
the  city,  Paris  quickly  resumed  her  place  as  the  capital  of 
fashion  and  gaiety.  Josephine  is  said  to  have  had  600  gowns 
in  her  wardrobe  and  the  women  of  two  worlds  moved  up  their 
waist  lines  in  conformity  with  her  girdle.  "The  great  thing 
for  Paris,  and  I  well  know  it,"  Napoleon  said,  "is  to  furnish 
dances,  cooks  and  fashions  to  Europe" — that  blood^'-handed 
Paris  which  but  yesterday  was  the  red  terror  of  tyrants  the 
earth  over! 

The  courtiers  and  servitors  of  the  Bourbons  were  wel- 
comed to  their  old  places.  Gorgeous  ushers  reappeared  with 
their  rods.  Judges  and  lawyers  put  on  their  robes  again. 
People  began  to  powder  their  hair  and  some  men  even  ven- 
tured to  sport  queues  and  ruffles.  ' '  Monsieur ' '  and  ' '  Madam ' ' 
drove  out  the  usurping  "Citizen"  and  "Citizeness." 

The  Tuileries  and  Malmaison  were  the  centres  round  which 
the  new  life  of  the  reborn  nation  revolved.  The  former  rises 
by  the  Seine  no  more,  having  been  long  ago  levelled  in  a 
frenzy  of  revolution.  But  France  to-day  cherishes  as  a  patri- 
otic shrine  the  home  of  Napoleon  and  Josephine  at  Malmai- 
son in  the  pristine  glory  of  the  Consulate,  when  they  still  typi- 
fied the  majesty  of  the  Republic. 


150  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

That  modest,  suburban  three-story  stone  villa  at  Reuil  in 
the  valley  of  the  Seine  between  St.  Cloud  and  St.  Germain 
en  Laye  and  only  eight  or  nine  miles  from  the  centre  of 
Paris  looks  more  like  the  country  house  of  a  merchant  than 
the  seat  of  a  great  ruler.  Josephine  selected  it  while  her  hus- 
band was  in  Egypt  and  the  purchase  price  was  only  $32,000. 

But  she  bought  adjoining  lands  and  laid  out  a  park  that 
was  fit  for  a  fairy  princess.  Only  a  little  of  this  remains, 
however,  the  estate  having  lately  been  cut  up  into  villa  gar- 
dens. One  of  the  new  streets  that  crosses  what  was  formerly 
the  park  bears  the  name  of  the  Rue  Tuck,  in  recognition  of 
an  American  from  New  Hampshire  who  was  influential  in 
the  development  of  the  neighbourhood. 

Malmaison  is  treasured  now  among  the  priceless  national 
monuments  of  France.  Pilgrims  from  all  over  the  world 
pour  in  streams  through  the  shady  gateway  of  the  chateau 
and  into  its  halls  and  chambers,  sighing  over  Josephine's 
harp  with  its  broken  strings,  and  looking  with  curious  eyes 
at  Josephine's  bed  whereon  she  died,  her  ornate  washstand, 
her  gorgeous  dinner  service  and  costly  ornaments,  mostly  the 
gifts  of  sovereigns  and  governments,  her  work  table  and  em- 
broidery frame. 

The  cedar  she  planted  still  casts  its  shade  out  on  the  lawn, 
where  the  tents  used  to  be  pitched  as  in  an  army  camp,  and 
where  in  his  shirtsleeves  Napoleon  played  "prisoner's  base" 
with  hilarious  young  men  and  screaming  young  women. 
The  shepherd's  hut  and  the  Swiss  dairy  have  vanished  from 
the  park;  the  marble  gods  and  nymphs  that  Josephine  set  up 
are  mossy  with  age;  her  cascade  and  lake,  on  which  she  lav- 
ished a  fortune,  are  gone  dry,  but  the  bridge  still  spans  the 
now  arid  bed  of  the  brook. 

Her  theatre  no  longer  stands  among  the  trees,  where  the 
consular  court  were  wont  to  gather  and  be  entertained  by  the 
famous  players  of  Paris.  There,  too,  some  of  the  great  actors 
in  the  drama  of  the  Napoleonic  era  used  to  play  at  amateur 
theatricals,  with  Josephine  as  the  presiding  genius,  and  when 
Napoleon  prankishly  hissed,  she  announced  that  any  person 


A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON  151 

dissatisfied  with  the  performance  could  have  his  money  re- 
funded at  the  door. 

The  prettiest  memorials  of  Josephine  in  her  fanciful  Eden 
are  the  flowers  and  shrubs  she  imported  from  her  native  Mar- 
tinique, a  few  of  which  go  on  blooming  as  when  she  watched 
over  these  friends  of  her  childhood  and  watered  them  with 
her  own  hands.  She  drew  on  that  West  Indian  island  for 
many  kinds  of  seeds  and  plants,  but  begged  in  vain  for  her 
mother  to  come  to  her.  She  sent  her  the  handsome  chaplet 
which  the  Pope  gave  her,  and  Hortense  drew  for  her  grand- 
mother a  portrait  of  Napoleon  walking  in  the  park  of  Mal- 
maison.  Mme.  Tascher,  however,  chose  to  live  on  in  the 
kitchen  of  the  ruined  house  at  Trois  Islets  alone  with  a  negro 
servant. 

Josephine  called  the  garden  at  Malmaison  her  family,  and 
her  favourite  salon  was  in  a  big  greenhouse,  where  she  held 
court  in  the  midst  of  fragrance  and  beauty.  Botany,  per- 
haps, was  her  one  certain  accomplishment.  She  could  neither 
sing  nor  play  any  instrument,  for  the  harp  with  the  broken 
strings,  which  the  pilgrims  to  INIalmaison  see  now,  only  serves 
to  recall  the  prosaic  fact  that  its  mistress'  repertory  was  lim- 
ited to  a  single  air.  She  dabbled  a  bit  with  tapestry,  and  she 
and  her  friends  made  the  coverings  for  some  of  the  furni- 
ture in  the  house. 

But  she  was  most  at  home  with  her  flowers.  One  of  her 
pleasures  was  to  array  her  lithesome  self  in  simple  India  mus- 
lin and  lead  her  husband  along  the  winding,  bloom-em- 
broidered paths,  for  he  always  vowed  that  the  prettiest  sight 
for  mortal  eyes  was  a  tall,  slender  woman  in  white,  strolling 
in  a  leafy  lane.  She  liked  to  bewilder  his  botanical  igno- 
rance with  her  knowledge  of  the  names  and  habits  of  all  the 
things  in  her  little  floral  world,  and  we  are  told  that  she  wept 
in  her  great  Paris  palace  when  he  kept  her  away  from  INIal- 
maison  in  the  flowering  time  of  her  hyacinths  and  tulips — a 
single  tulip  bulb  had  cost  her  $800. 

The  First  Consul's  own  special  favourites  in  the  park  were 
the  gazelles  which  had  been  brought  from  Egypt.     He  used 


152  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

to  amuse  himself  by  feeding  them,  and  he  laughed  to  find 
them  inordinately  fond  of  eating  out  of  his  snufif  box.  Some 
moufflons,  or  wild  sheep,  he  imported  from  Corsica,  disap- 
pointed him,  however,  by  rejecting  his  hospitality  and  run- 
ning away. 

Josephine's  rare  song  birds,  at  which  her  spouse,  in  a  spirit 
of  rude  teasing,  aimed  his  pistol  shots  from  a  chateau  win- 
dow, no  longer  sing  in  the  trees  of  Malmaison,  whose  barks 
bear  the  bullet  scars  of  the  German  invader  in  the  Franco- 
Prussian  "War.  For  alien  armies  have  twice  invaded  Napo- 
leon's dooryard — in  1815  and  in  1870. 

The  bell  of  the  old  Reuil  church  still  sends  its  peals  upon 
the  air  as  in  the  days  when  it  was  music  to  the  ear  of  Na- 
poleon. "Ah,"  the  man  of  state  sighed,  "that  reminds  me 
of  the  bells  of  Brienne.  I  was  happy  there!"  The  bell, 
however,  was  not  his  only  reminder  of  Brienne.  He  had 
appointed  Fr.  Dupuis  one  of  the  old  friars  and  teachers 
there,  to  be  the  librarian  at  Malmaison,  although  there  really 
was  no  library  in  the  house,  and  Fr.  Dupuis  never  was  seen 
to  touch  a  book;  but  his  one-time  pupil  enjoyed  seeing  him 
about  the  place.  The  porter  of  the  Brienne  school,  too,  was 
brought  to  Malmaison  and  installed  in  a  like  post  at  the 
chateau. 

The  woodland  workroom  of  the  First  Consul  is  yet  in  the 
park,  a  little  vine-clad  retreat  from  the  frivolity  of  the  young 
people  who  filled  the  chateau  with  their  mirth.  But  his  pref- 
erence was  a  tent  in  the  garden,  and  one  of  his  campaign  tents 
is  there  now.  In  such  a  place  he  carried  on  at  Malmaison 
much  of  the  business  of  his  widespread  realm.  "I  cannot 
understand  men,"  he  said,  "who  can  sit  by  the  stove  and 
work  without  any  view  of  the  sky." 

Mme.  de  Remusat  said  that  he  was  only  fitted  for  a  tent  or 
a  throne,  where  everything  would  be  permitted  him,  for,  she 
tells  us,  he  did  not  know  how  to  enter  or  leave  a  room,  make 
a  bow,  sit  down  properly  or  converse ;  he  could  only  ask 
abrupt  questions  or  make  impertinent  comments.  Mme.  de 
Stael,  on  the  other  hand,  was  so  pleased  by  an  interview  she 
held  with  him  that  she  reported  the  remarkable   dialogue, 


A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON  153 

which  Josephine  condemned,  however,  as  an  exhibition  of  her 
husband's  vulgarity: 

"General,  whom  do  you  regard  as  the  greatest  woman  in 
the  world?" 

"She,  madam,  who  has  borne  the  most  children." 

"But  whom  do  you  esteem  highest?" 

"She  who  is  the  best  housekeeper." 

"It  is  said.  General,  you  are  not  fond  of  women?" 

"Pardon  me,  madam,  I  am  very  fond  of  my  wife." 

Although  Stendhal  tells  us  that  Napoleon's  look  became 
excessively  gentle  when  he  spoke  to  a  woman,  his  wizardry 
was  pretty  sharply  confined  to  the  limits  of  his  own  sex  and 
left  women  comparatively  unenthralled.  He  treated  them 
too  much  like  soldiers,  often  walking  down  a  line  of  loveli- 
ness as  if  he  were  on  a  military  inspection.  Sometimes  he 
playfully  pinched  their  ears  till  thej^  shrieked,  reproving  them 
if  their  cheeks  were  not  rouged  to  his  taste,  or  chiding  them 
for  wearing  old  gowns, 

"You  are  too  pale,"  he  said  to  Mme.  de  Remusat,  as  if 
rebuking  a  grenadier  for  a  spot  on  his  coat;  "two  things 
are  very  becoming  to  women,  rouge  and  tears."  To  another 
woman  he  exclaimed,  "Heavens!  How  red  your  elbows 
are!"  To  another,  "What  an  ugly  headdress!"  Mme. 
Junot  was  too  defiant.  "Remember,"  he  admonished  her, 
"a  woman  ceases  to  charm  whenever  she  makes  herself 
feared. ' ' 

Yet  this  same  Mme.  Junot  herself  assures  us  in  her  venge- 
ful "Memoirs"  that  it  is  impossible  to  describe  the  charm  of 
his  countenance,  the  magic  of  his  smile  when  he  was  animated 
by  a  feeling  of  benevolence — "his  soul  was  upon  his  lips  and 
in  his  eyes."  She  describes  his  brows  as  formed  to  wear  the 
crowns  of  the  whole  world ;  his  hands  as  worthy  the  envy  of 
the  most  coquettish  woman ;  a  white,  soft  skin  covering  his 
muscles  of  steel. 

It  is  certain  he  was  not  lacking  in  one  respect :  his  air  was 
already  regal  and  his  appearance  had  grown  majestic. 
Much  of  the  time  until  he  was  twenty-four  or  twenty-five,  he 
did  not  have  enough  to  eat ;  but  in  the  Consulate  he  was  no 


154  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

longer  lean  and  hungry-looking.  On  the  contrary,  his  hollow 
cheeks  had  rounded  into  a  becoming  fulness;  his  complexion, 
having  lost  its  yellowness,  was  clear  and  fresh;  his  body, 
plump  but  not  yet  portly,  now  filled  out  his  clothes. 

How  tall  was  Napoleon?  In  the  first  place,  he  was  by  no 
means  as  short  as  many  historians  have  mistakenly  assumed. 
Some  of  the  most  careful  writers  have  fallen  into  error  on 
this  point,  through  an  inaccurate  translation.  The  transla- 
tors of  Constant  and  of  ]\Iallet  du  Pan  say  he  was  five  feet 
three  inches,  while  the  translator  of  Baron  de  Meneval  says 
he  was  five  feet  two  inches.  Those  latter  figures  are  most  gen- 
erally adopted. 

It  is  true  that  by  the  French  measurement  he  was  five  feet 
two  inches  and  four  lines ;  but  the  French  foot  is  longer  than 
the  English,  and  Napoleon's  actual  height  was  five  feet  six 
and  one-third  inches.  His  grey  overcoat  hanging  now  in  the 
Hotel  des  Invalides  is  itself  four  feet  three  inches  in  length. 

His  stature  therefore  was  not  far  from  medium,  according 
to  the  modest  standards  of  Latin  nations.  His  habit  of  stoop- 
ing, however,  with  his  hands  behind  him,  and  his  short  neck 
made  him  appear  shorter  than  he  was.  He  did  not  have  the 
vanity  of  small  men  to  make  themselves  seem  larger  and  em- 
ployed no  trick  to  enhance  his  height. 

His  shoulders  were  broad  and  his  trunk  was  long  for  his 
legs,  which,  however,  were  well  shaped.  He  was  vain  of  his 
small  feet — his  treasured  shoes  and  slippers  look  like  a 
woman's — of  his  delicate  hand  with  its  tapering  fingers,  and 
of  his  teeth,  albeit  they  were  hardly  worthy  of  his  pride. 

His  bust  was  a  handsome  one,  in  spite  of  being  mounted  on 
an  inadequate  pedestal;  well  designed  for  the  gallery  of  im- 
mortals. The  profile  was  modelled  to  adorn  an  imperial  coin- 
age, while  the  great  head,  twenty-two  inches  in  circumference, 
which  had  alarmed  his  family  in  his  infancy,  the  high  broad 
forehead,  the  luminous  grey,  eagle  eyes,  the  straight,  sensi- 
tive nose,  the  smooth,  ivory  skin  were  the  delight  of  artists, 
many  of  whom,  however,  chose  to  give  him  dark  hair  rather 
than  his  own  fine,  though  thin,  chestnut  locks.  We  see  some 
lack  of  strength  in  the  under  lip,  as  it  was  drawn  in  his  early 


A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON  155 

portraits,  bnt  when  he  rose  to  mastery,  the  painters  and 
sculptors  corrected  their  predecessors  in  this  detail,  or  per- 
haps improved  on  nature  herself. 

The  expression  of  his  face  was  so  active  that  it  was  like  a 
moving-picture  film  of  his  mind.  He  could  still  smile  when 
he  became  Consul,  as  softly,  as  sweetly  as  a  girl,  but  he  could 
no  longer  laugh. 

If  angered,  a  sort  of  cyclone  suddenly  tore  across  his  coun- 
tenance and  convulsed  every  feature;  a  tempest  swept  the 
brow;  the  eyes  blazed;  the  nostrils  swelled;  the  mouth  con- 
tracted; the  hand  seized  the  offender  or  smashed  the 
gilded  furniture  of  a  palace  chamber.  But  the  storm  passed 
as  quickly  as  it  came,  and  left  him  as  calm  as  a  summer  har- 
bour after  a  downpour  of  rain.  Notwithstanding  these  facial 
hurricanes,  he  insisted  that  his  passions  never  rose  above  his 
neck,  and  his  physicians  corroborate  him  with  the  report  that 
his  blood  was  not  given  to  rushing  to  his  head. 

He  had  the  weak  desire  of  one  who  had  suffered  from  pov- 
erty and  privation  to  see  himself  surrounded  with  a  display 
of  luxury  and  splendour.  But  Josephine 's  almost  childish  ex- 
travagance often  made  him  wince.  The  mistress  of  Malmai- 
son  had  far  more  taste  than  thrift,  and  she  pursued  her  love 
of  pretty  things  there  and  in  Paris  with  a  light-hearted  dis- 
regard of  the  cost. 

The  tradesmen  were  quick  to  discover  her  weakness  and 
prey  upon  it.  Napoleon  had  forbidden  them  admission  to 
her,  but  laden  with  their  tempting  wares  they  penetrated  and 
crowded  her  apartments.  When  at  last  their  clamours  for 
payments  came  to  his  ears,  he  ordered  Bourrienne  to  investi- 
gate the  matter.  Josephine  confessed  to  the  secretary  that 
she  owed  $240,000,  but  begged  him  to  conceal  half  of  the  stag- 
gering total  from  her  husband  for  the  present,  in  order  to 
spare  her  his  violence. 

The  pile  of  bills  astounded  Bourrienne;  thirty-eight  new 
hats,  heron  plumes  to  the  value  of  $360,  and  perfumes  to  the 
value  of  $160  in  one  month.  The  secretary  called  in  the  credi- 
tors and  insisted  on  cutting  their  extortionate  charges  in  half. 
One  man  who  had  made  out  a  bill  for  $16,000  received  only 


156     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

$7000,  but  was  still  able  to  congratulate  himself  on  having 
made  a  liberal  profit. 

That  was  not  Bourrienne's  only  unpleasant  experience  of 
the  same  kind.  When  Napoleon  bestowed  on  a  sister  as  a 
wedding  gift  a  necklace  belonging  to  Josephine,  she  longed  to 
replace  the  ornament  with  some  pearls  she  had  seen  which 
once  belonged  to  Marie  Antoinette.  The  price  was  $50,000 
cash,  and  not  daring  to  propose  such  an  extravagance  to  Na- 
poleon, she  was  aided  to  make  the  purchase  by  General  Ber- 
thier,  who  proceeded  to  extort  the  needed  amount  from  a  big 
army  contractor. 

After  getting  the  coveted  pearls,  Josephine  could  not  sum- 
mon the  courage  to  wear  them  and  let  them  be  seen  by  her 
husband,  who  Bourrienne  tells  us  was  somewhat  of  a  busy- 
body. Finally,  unable  longer  to  resist  and  conceal  the  beau- 
tiful necklace,  she  implored  the  secretary  to  stay  near  her 
and  defend  her  in  the  inevitable  scene. 

''How  fine  you  are  to-day,"  Napoleon  said;  and  then,  just 
as  she  had  expected  and  feared,  he  added,  "What  is  it  you 
have  there?     Where  did  you  get  those  pearls?" 

"  0 !  i\Ion  Dieu ! ' '  Josephine  replied  in  her  most  caressing 
tone.  "You  have  seen  them  a  dozen  times  before.  It  is  the 
necklace  the  Cisalpine  Republic  gave  me.  Ask  Bourrienne; 
he  will  tell  j^ou." 

"Yes,  General,"  the  second  conspirator  said  in  corrobora- 
tion of  the  first,  "I  recollect  very  well  seeing  this  necklace 
before." 

Still  Josephine  was  worth  all  she  cost  Napoleon.  Great 
stage  director  as  he  was,  his  court  never  would  have  been 
much  more  than  a  camp  except  for  the  assistance  of  his  wife. 
He  said  in  Italy:  "I  win  battles  while  Josephine  wins 
hearts." 

He  bound  together  the  French  factions  in  law  and  justice 
and  glory;  but  socially  the  old  France  and  the  new  were 
united  by  the  tact  and  charm  of  Josephine.  It  was  in  her 
drawing  room,  long  before  they  would  cross  his  threshold, 
that  the  returning  aristocrats  first  consented  to  mingle  with 
the  men  and  women  of  the  Revolution.     She  filled  with  flow- 


A  DAY  AT  MALMAISON  157 

ers  the  bloody  chasm  that  had  long  divided  them,  and  drew 
them  together  with  her  smile.  She  eared  nothing  for  their 
tragic  quarrel  and  was  herself  too  amiable  for  quarrelling. 
"She  has  no  more  resentment  than  a  pigeon,"  Napoleon  said. 

As  the  women  of  the  nobility  began  to  gather  about  her, 
she  did  not  forget  her  friends  in  the  dark  days  and  wept 
when  her  husband  drew  the  line  on  Mme.  Tallien,  her  com- 
panion in  prison.  Napoleon  assured  her  he  liked  her  loyalty 
and  was  sorry  to  ban  old  friends ;  but  a  new  court  had  to  be 
very  careful  of  its  moral  tone. 

Already  the  shadow  of  the  coming  dynasty  had  fallen  upon 
Josephine  and  Fouche  had  read  aloud  to  the  First  Consul  in 
the  presence  of  others  a  newspaper  report  that  her  divorce 
was  contemplated  because  she  had  not  presented  her  husband 
with  an  heir.  Josephine,  too,  had  frequently  been  made  to 
listen  to  the  same  disquieting  suggestion.  Her  new  position 
in  the  world  was  costing  her  dear,  and  she  was  not  a  very 
ambitious  woman.  If  she  still  did  not  love  her  husband,  she 
had  grown  fond  enough  to  be  loyal  to  him  and  to  suffer  the 
pangs  of  jealousy  from  his  disloj^alty. 

As  the  dyer's  hand  is  subdued  to  what  it  works  in,  a  man 
cannot  exercise  a  despotism  without  developing  a  despotic 
nature.  Napoleon  had  become  a  law  unto  himself  in  all 
things  great  and  small.  "I  am  not  a  man  like  other  men," 
he  frankly  told  Mme.  de  Remusat,  "and  moral  laws  and  the 
laws  of  propriety  do  not  apply  to  me."  As  his  iron  power 
over  nations  increased,  he  could  no  longer  feel  bound  by  the 
silken  tie  of  matrimony,  and  ever\'  day  the  poor,  little  wife 
saw  her  eagle  soaring  farther  and  farther  away  from  her. 

The  net  of  intrigue,  drawing  about  her  day  by  day,  grew 
finer  and  finer  in  its  mesh.  To  gain  more  influence  in  the 
hostile  counsels  of  the  Bonaparte  family,  she  promoted  the 
marriage  of  General  ]\Iurat  with  Caroline  Bonaparte,  rely- 
ing on  Murat's  friendship  to  aid  her.  In  increasing  des- 
peration and  though  loving  her  dearly,  she  sacrificed  even 
her  own  daughter  to  save  herself.  Anxiously  promoting  a 
further  alliance  with  the  Bonapartes,  she  made  a  match  that 
was  no  match  at  all  between  Hortense  and  Louis  Bonaparte. 


158     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

They  hated  each  other,  and  the  bride  was  led  weeping  to  the 
altar.  Their  first  baby  being  a  boy,  Josephine  welcomed  him 
as  a  candidate  for  the  succession  and  he  was  christened  Na- 
poleon Charles. 

The  lack  of  an  heir  probably  was  not  Josephine's  only  mo- 
tive for  counselling  her  husband  against  dynastic  ambitions; 
very  likely  a  woman's  native  prudence  was  also  among  her 
promptings.  Her  heart  sank  now  as  in  the  days  of  her  court- 
ship when  she  marked  the  wild  flights  of  his  fancy  and  am- 
bition. 

Once  Napoleon  asked  her  to  tell  him  his  defects  and  she 
replied,  "I  know  only  two:  weakness  and  indiscretion.  You 
permit  yourself  to  be  influenced  by  persons  who  are  only 
seeking  your  downfall,  and  you  are  so  fond  of  arguing  that 
you  let  your  secret  thoughts  escape."  He  fondly  took  her 
in  his  arms  as  he  admitted  the  correctness  of  her  diagnosis — 
and  put  aside  her  womanly  intuition.  She  warned  him  again 
and  again,  as  she  told  Thibaudeau,  that  "two  things  ruin  men 
— weakness  and  ambition. ' '  But  she  complained  he  would  not 
discuss  politics  with  her.  Did  a  man  ever  discuss  his  plunges 
with  his  wife? 

Seating  herself  on  his  knee  and  running  her  hand  through 
his  hair,  she  said  to  him:  "I  entreat  you,  Bonaparte,  do  not 
make  yourself  King ! ' '  But  the  husband  gently  and  smilingly 
dismissed  her  like  a  child,  "Come  now!  You  interrupt  me — 
leave  me  alone ! ' '  Bourrienne  reports  the  interview  and  also 
Josephine's  later  appeal  to  him,  when  he  told  her  that  he 
feared  Napoleon  could  not  be  dissuaded  from  placing  a  crown 
on  her  head.  "My  God!  Bourrienne,"  she  replied,  "such  an 
ambition  is  farthest  from  my  wish.  Try  to  prevent  his  mak- 
ing himself  King."  The  secretary  confessed  that  he  had  al- 
ready exhausted  his  influence  to  thwart  Napoleon's  purposes 
and  had  reminded  him  that  being  childless  he  would  have  no 
one  to  whom  to  bequeath  the  throne. 

"My  kind  friend,"  Josephine  eagerly  inquired,  "when  you 
spoke  of  children,  did  he  say  anything  to  you?  Did  he  talk 
of  a  divorce?"  Bourrienne  lowers  the  curtain  on  this  scene 
with  Josephine  crying,  "Good  God!     How  unhappy  I  am!" 


CHAPTEE  XX 
HOW  THE  REPUBLIC  DIED 

FRANCE,  under  the  Consulate,  quickly  became  the  envy 
of  the  nations. 
It  was  an  era  of  unexampled  peace  and  order.  All 
men  were  equal  before  the  law  and  free  to  do  what  they  liked, 
only  provided  they  let  politics  alone.  Peasant  and  noble 
were  safe  in  their  homes,  their  properties  and  their  businesses. 
"The  stage  coach  went  without  a  guard."  The  country 
waxed  prosperous  beyond  all  precedent.  Taxes  were  light 
and  the  national  bonds  rose  in  two  golden  years  from  twelve 
francs  to  sixty-five. 

Yet  the  Republic  perished.  The  operation  was  successful, 
but  the  patient  died ! 

The  Consulate  was  a  brilliant  and  benevolent  despotism. 
It  took  away  only  the  people's  dream  of  liberty  and  their 
ideal  of  a  free  republic,  two  boons  they  never  had  enjoyed. 
It  gave  them  in  exchange  the  abounding  genius  and  energy 
of  Napoleon,  who  served  them  better  than  they  could  serve 
themselves. 

A  wise  and  pure  despotism  is  the  wisest  and  purest  of  gov- 
ernments. But  its  fatal  defect  is  that  it  dries  up  the  springs 
of  its  wisdom  and  purity,  public  opinion.  As  the  Firet  Con- 
sul waxed  more  masterful,  the  French  people  sank  into  a 
dumb  subserviency  until  he  could  no  longer  hear  their  voice. 
As  he  grew  stronger,  they  grew  weaker,  until  they  trembled 
at  the  thought  of  standing  alone  and  at  last  surrendered  them- 
selves wholly  to  his  iron  will. 

Many  look  back  upon  the  Consulate,  with  its  centralisation 
of  power,  its  revival  of  official  ceremonies  and  its  inaugura- 
tion of  the  Legion  of  Honour,  as  one  long,  crafty,  cold-blooded 
conspiracy  against  the  Republic  on  the  part  of  the  First  Con- 

159 


160    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

sul,  who,  day  by  day,  warily  and  steadily  crept  toward  the 
throne. 

This  opinion,  however,  gives  too  much  credit  to  his  fore- 
sight, a  quality  in  which  he  was  strangely  deficient.  For  this 
man  was  not  the  architect  of  his  own  fortunes.  His  plans 
were  overruled  in  nearly  every  important  instance  and  he 
was  always  the  creature  of  circumstances.  He  had  chosen 
to  be  a  writer  rather  than  a  soldier,  to  go  into  the  real  estate 
business  rather  than  into  the  Revolution,  to  be  a  Corsican 
rather  than  a  Frenchman,  to  be  a  drillmaster  for  the  Sultan 
of  Turkey  rather  than  serve  in  the  army  of  the  Republic,  to 
seek  martial  glory  in  Asia  rather  than  in  Europe,  and  finally 
to  return  to  the  Army  of  Italy  rather  than  be  First  Consul. 

Once  he  was  installed  as  dictator  of  France,  in  November, 
1799,  the  throne  was  the  natural  if  not  inevitable  goal  of  the 
dictatorship.  It  was  as  unnecessary  for  him  to  conspire  for 
the  crown  as  for  the  consulship,  as  unnecessary  for  him  to  plot 
against  the  Republic  as  against  the  Directory.  He  frankly 
said  to  the  council  of  state:  "France  is  not  yet  a  republic; 
whether  she  will  be  one  is  still  highly  problematical ;  the  next 
five  or  six  years  will  decide."  That  was  true,  and  nine 
Frenchmen  out  of  ten  knew  it. 

Enemies  as  well  as  friends  played  their  part  in  hurrying 
the  Republic  toward  the  Empire  and  Napoleon  toward  the 
throne,  all  classes  and  events  conspiring  to  the  same  end. 
Bourbon  plots  supplied,  indeed,  the  strongest  argument  for 
making  the  change. 

The  old  royal  family  in  their  exile  persisted  in  the  folly 
which  had  lost  them  their  kingdom.  It  was  truly  said  of  the 
Bourbons  that  in  their  misfortunes,  "they  learned  nothing 
and  forgot  nothing. ' '  Failing  in  their  armed  treason  against 
their  country  as  allies  of  jealous  foreign  nations,  they  de- 
scended to  the  next  step  in  their  degradation  and  tried  to 
bribe  their  way  back  to  the  throne.  When  Napoleon  came 
they  found  a  man  they  could  not  buy. 

After  he  became  First  Consul,  the  pretender,  Louis  XVIII, 
younger  brother  of  Louis  XVI,  wrote  the  young  ruler,  beg- 
ging for  the  lost  throne  and  bluntly  asking  him  to  name  his 


HOW  THE  KEPUBLIC  DIED 

price :  "  If  you  doubt  my  gratitude,  lix  your  reward  and  ma. 
out  the  fortunes  of  your  friends."  To  that  base  appeal  from 
the  son  of  St.  Louis,  the  son  of  the  people  returned  this  kingly 
reply:  *'You  must  not  seek  to  return  to  France,  To  do  so 
you  would  have  to  trample  upon  100,000  dead  bodies.  Sac- 
rifice your  interest  to  the  repose  and  happiness  of  France,  and 
history  will  render  you  justice." 

In  their  despair  the  Bourbons  then  sank  to  the  level  of 
assassins.  For  years  they  had  maintained  their  emissaries  in 
Paris  for  the  purpose  of  fomenting  revolution  and  anarchy. 
But,  under  Napoleon's  masterful  rule,  the  country  was 
quickly  pacified  and  the  nation  reunited.  France  prospered 
and  revolutions  languished. 

The  Bourbons  found  themselves  without  an  active  party, 
and  unable  even  to  incite  a  riot.  If  they  could  not  hope  to 
overthrow  the  government,  they  could  plot  the  assassination 
of  Napoleon.  As  he  was  on  his  way  to  the  opera  in  the  win- 
ter of  1800-1,  his  driver,  a  veteran  who  had  been  with  him 
in  Egypt,  and  whom  he  had  nicknamed  Cffisar,  found  a  cart, 
apparently  a  water  cart,  standing  across  the  street.  When 
the  escort  had  drawn  it  to  one  side,  Caesar,  exasperated  by  the 
delay,  whipped  up  his  horses  and  drove  on  at  a  furious  pace. 
In  two  seconds  an  infernal  machine  on  the  cart  exploded. 

Cffsar  had  driven  so  fast  as  to  remove  his  distinguished 
passenger  beyond  harm's  reach,  but  several  persons  in  the 
street  had  been  killed  and  many  wounded.  INIore  than  forty 
houses  were  shattered,  and  even  the  glass  in  the  windows  of 
the  Tuileries  was  smashed. 

Napoleon  gave  rein  to  a  passion  for  punishing  the  perpe- 
trators of  the  outrage.  He  refused  to  believe  that  the  Bour- 
bons would  resort  to  such  a  murderous  measure,  although  his 
minister  of  police,  Fouche,  insisted  it  was  a  royalist  and  not 
a  republican  plot.  "They  are  the  Terrorists,"  the  First  Con- 
sul insisted,  "wretches  stained  with  blood.  The  Bourbons  are 
simply  a  skin  disease,  but  the  Terrorists  are  an  internal 
malady." 

In  his  determination  to  terrify  the  Terrorists,  130  men  were 
rushed  into  penal  banishment  without  any  evidence  against 


162    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

them.  Afterward  it  was  discovered  that  they  had  nothing 
to  do  with  the  infernal  machine,  and  that  it  was  the  work  of 
the  royalists,  two  of  whom  were  detected,  convicted,  and  ex- 
ecuted. Yet,  so  persistent  was  Napoleon's  suspicion  that  the 
Terrorists  were  a  menace  to  his  government  he  did  not  recall 
the  poor  exiles  from  their  prison  colony  in  the  tropics. 

Fouche,  whose  duty  it  was  to  watch  the  enemies  of  the 
First  Consul,  but  who  always  kept  the  sharpest  watch  on  the 
First  Consul  himself,  boasted  in  after  years  that  he  hired 
Bourrienne  to  spy  on  his  chief.  The  Bourbon  conspirators 
also  passed  around  the  word  that  "the  secretary  is  for  sale." 
However  that  may  be,  the  tender  spot  which  Napoleon  always 
kept  for  old  friends  and  associates  was  sore  wounded  by  the 
oldest  and  closest  of  them  all.  He  had  been  glad  to  share 
his  prosperity  with  Bourrienne  as  freely  as  they  had  shared 
their  poverty  at  Brienne  and  in  the  streets  of  Paris.  He 
gave  him  apartments  in  the  Tuileries  and  also  gave  his  family 
an  independent  establishment. 

Disdaining  to  limit  his  friend  and  confidant  to  a  fixed 
salary,  he  invited  him  to  help  himself  from  their  common 
cash  drawer  in  the  palace,  and  no  account  was  kept  between 
them.  He  flattered  himself  he  could  share  with  him  even  his 
fame.  "Ah,  Bourrienne!"  he  proudly  exclaimed.  "You 
also  will  be  immortal." 

"How,  General?"  the  friend  asked. 

"Are  you  not  my  secretary?" 

Poor  Bourrienne  could  not  content  himself  with  this  re- 
flected immortality,  and  loving  what  his  chief  despised, 
money,  he  yielded  to  the  one  sin  Napoleon  always  refused  to 
compound  in  his  own  immediate  household.  When  at  last  a 
case  in  court  disclosed  the  secretary  as  a  partner  of  govern- 
ment contractors  and  his  avarice  thus  became  a  public  scan- 
dal, the  First  Consul  dismissed  him,  telling  him  as  he  slammed 
the  door  in  his  face,  "Never  let  me  see  you  again." 

"Why!"  Napoleon  grieved  to  Meneval,  the  assistant  who 
now  took  the  place  of  the  unfaithful  secretary,  "I  have  known 
that  man  since  he  was  nine  years  old  ! ' '     Still  wishing  to  spare 


HOW  THE  REPUBLIC  DIED  163 

him  the  full  measure  of  disgrace,  he  officially  announced  that 
Bourrienne  had  been  promoted  to  other  duties,  and,  indeed, 
it  was  not  long  until  he  did  find  employment  for  him.  But 
he  would  not  see  him,  and  they  never  met  again  except  on 
one  occasion,  when  Bourrienne  was  summoned  to  receive  his 
commission  as  minister  at  Hamburg,  where  for  many  years 
he  continued  his  peculations  and  ended  by  conspiring  with 
the  Bourbons  against  his  forbearing  friend  and  benefactor. 

The  Bourbons  never  relented  or  rested  in  their  savage  pur- 
pose to  strike  down  the  man  that  stood  in  their  way.  They 
seized  upon  the  reopening  of  the  war  between  England  and 
France  to  spring  their  grand  plot.  It  began  to  unfold  itself 
late  in  the  summer  of  1803,  when  an  English  naval  officer 
landed  a  little  party  of  French  royalists  at  the  foot  of  a  steep 
cliff  on  the  coast  of  Normandy.  The  leader  was  a  remarkable 
character,  a  Breton  named  Georges  Cadoudal,  who  had  bravely 
fought  in  the  royalist  rebellious  of  La  Vendee  in  the  time  of 
the  Revolution.  Georges  was  joined  by  General  Pichegru,  a 
teacher  of  Napoleon  in  the  military  school  of  Brienne  and 
later  a  general  in  the  Revolution.  Pichegru 's  part  in  the 
plot  was  to  induce  General  Moreau,  the  foremost  military 
commander  under  the  First  Consul,  to  enter  into  the  conspir- 
acy, and  win  over  the  support  of  the  army.  Once  Moreau 's 
co-operation  was  assured,  two  of  the  Bourbon  princes,  the 
Count  d'Artois  and  the  Duke  de  Berry,  were  to  come  from 
England,  personally  join  in  waylaying  Napoleon  on  the  road 
to  Malmaison,  and,  having  abducted  or  assassinated  him,  seize 
the  government  in  the  name  of  Louis  XVIII. 

Pichegru  found  Moreau  ready  enough  to  conspire,  but  not 
for  the  Bourbons.  *'Do  with  Bonaparte  what  you  will,"  he 
said,  "but  do  not  ask  me  to  put  a  Bourbon  in  his  place." 
Nevertheless  Moreau  soon  found  himself  locked  up,  for  spies 
were  following  the  conspiracy  step  by  step. 

Napoleon  wished  above  all  to  catch  the  Bourbon  princes, 
and  he  posted  Savary  at  the  cliff  on  the  Normandy  coast  to 
lie  in  wait  there  for  the  princely  prey.  He  was  filled  with  a 
ferocious  passion  for  revenge  on  the  royalists.     "Am  I  a  dog 


164  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

to  be  beaten  to  death  in  the  streets?"  he  demanded.  "I  will 
pitilessly  shoot  the  very  first  of  these  princes  who  shall  fall 
into  my  hands." 

Moreau  having  disappointed  them,  however,  the  princes  did 
not  climb  up  on  the  cliff  where  Savary  sat  watching  like  a 
terrier  beside  a  rat-hole.  Nor  could  the  hiding  places  of 
Georges  and  Pichegru  be  found  until  Paris  suddenly  shut  down 
on  them  like  a  trap.  The  gates  of  the  city  were  closed,  the 
walls  were  patrolled  and  no  one  was  permitted  to  leave  the 
capital.  Pichegru  was  hunted  down  and  thrown  into  prison, 
where  he  strangled  himself  to  death  in  his  cell.  Next  Georges 
was  found  and  taken  in  the  street,  but  not  until  he  had  shot 
dead  one  of  his  pursuers  and  seriously  wounded  another. 
He  and  nineteen  of  his  accomplices,  including  a  marquis  and 
the  heir  to  a  dukedom,  were  tried  and  condemned  to  die. 
Moreau  was  sentenced  to  two  years'  imprisonment,  but  Na- 
poleon pardoned  him,  on  condition  that  he  go  to  the  United 
States  and  stay  there. 

Meanwhile  a  Bourbon  prince  had  been  caught.  In  the 
midst  of  the  excitement  attending  the  man  hunt  in  Paris,  a 
report  was  received  that  the  young  Duke  d'Enghien,  a  de- 
scendant of  the  great  Conde,  was  living  in  the  duchy  of 
Baden,  a  few  miles  from  the  French  frontier,  where  he  was 
conspiring  with  General  Dumouriez,  another  General  of  the 
Revolution,  who,  like  Pichegru,  had  been  bought  up  by  the 
Bourbons.  It  was  further  reported  that  the  Prince  had  actu- 
ally made  secret  visits  to  Paris. 

A  squad  of  thirty  horsemen  was  sent  into  Baden,  although 
it  was  not  French  soil ;  the  Duke  was  kidnapped  and  hurried 
to  Paris.  While  he  was  on  the  way,  however,  it  became 
known  to  the  government  that  he  had  not  been  with  Dumou- 
riez at  all,  and  it  was  seen  that  there  was  no  evidence  what- 
ever that  he  had  any  part  in  the  plottings  of  the  other  branch 
of  the  Bourbon  family.  It  was  true  that  he  had  served  in 
foreign  armies  against  France  and  was  then  in  the  pay  of 
England,  but  he  was  not  a  conspirator. 

Napoleon's  rage,  however,  was  now  beyond  control.  The 
fight  had  become  a  Corsican  vendetta  between  the  Bonapartes 


HOW  THE  EEPUBLIC  DIED  165 

and  the  Bourbons,  and  no  kinsman  of  the  foe  should  be  spared. 
Some  of  those  around  .the  First  Consul  might  stand  aghast 
at  the  thought  of  shedding  royal  blood,  but  he  declared, 
"Neither  is  my  blood  ditchwater!"  To  the  tearful  appeals 
of  the  terrified  Josephine,  he  commanded,  "Begone!  You 
are  a  child!" 

Late  in  a  March  afternoon  of  1804,  the  captive  Duke  was 
conducted  into  the  big,  grey  fortress  of  Vincennes,  four  miles 
from  the  heart  of  Paris.  Although  he  was  yet  to  be  placed 
on  trial,  his  grave  was  already  dug  in  the  moat  on  the  other 
side  of  the  castle.  At  six  o'clock  in  the  morning  the  Duke 
was  led  out  of  the  door  of  the  castle,  the  door  that  looks  upon 
what  is  now  one  of  the  prettiest  and  most  popular  of  the 
forest  playgrounds  of  Paris,  and  down  into  the  moat.  There 
he  was  placed  with  his  back  to  the  wall  of  the  tower  and  fac- 
ing the  firing  squad.  His  request  that  a  priest  be  summoned 
to  attend  him  was  ignored,  but  when  he  asked  that  he  might 
be  permitted  to  send  a  lock  of  his  hair  to  his  sweetheart,  the 
Duchess  de  Rohan,  the  commander  of  the  squad  gruffly  in- 
quired of  his  men,  "Has  any  one  of  you  a  pair  of  scissors?" 
The  scissors  were  found  and  the  lock  was  clipped. 

The  Duke's  last  appeal  to  his  executioners  was  for  them 
not  to  miss  their  aim,  and  in  another  instant  he  fell  before 
the  fatal  volley,  pierced  through  the  heart.  The  corpse  was 
pushed  into  the  gaping  hole  beside  it,  but  there  to  pause  only 
a  few  years  until  the  return  of  the  Bourbons,  when  it  was 
disinterred  and  laid  to  rest  in  the  chapel  of  the  grim  old 
castle. 

A  small  slender  column  of  marble  was  erected  in  the  grassy 
moat  at  the  time  the  body  was  removed,  and  there  it  still 
stands  under  the  gaze  of  the  morbid  and  the  curious,  marking 
the  spot  where  the  last  of  the  House  of  Conde  fell — and 
where,  too,  in  the  twelfth  year  of  its  age  the  Republic  fell! 
For  it  was  well  said  of  the  Bourbon  conspirators  that  they 
came  to  give  France  a  King  and  gave  her  an  Emperor. 

The  blood  of  the  Bourbons,  and  indeed  of  all  the  royalty  in 
Europe,  ran  cold  with  horror  at  the  news  of  how  the  Duke 
d'Enghien  had  died.     The  court  of  the  Czar  Alexander  I  at 


166  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Petrograd  went  into  mourning,  and  the  King  of  Prussia  re- 
coiled from  Napoleon  into  an  alliance  with  Russia. 

Paris  met  the  event  with  mixed  feelings.  Some  protest- 
ing person  coined  his  whispered  denunciation  of  the  killing 
in  a  memorable  phrase,  "It  is  worse  than  a  crime — it  is  a 
blunder ! ' ' 

The  evening  of  the  tragic  day  was  a  silent  and  gloomy 
occasion  at  IMalmaison.  The  strain  was  not  broken  until  the 
company  had  risen  from  dinner,  when  Napoleon  himself  be- 
gan to  speak  of  the  inevitable  cruelties  which  history  charged 
against  rulers  from  the  time  of  the  Roman  Emperors, 
abruptly  concluding  with  the  exclamatory  declaration:  ''They 
wish  to  destroy  the  Revolution  in  attacking  my  person,  for 
I,  I,  I  am  the  Revolution ! ' ' 

At  once  the  suggestion  was  flashed  abroad  that  the  only 
security  for  the  peace  of  the  country  and  the  security  of  the 
new  order  against  the  old,  lay  in  providing  an  hereditary 
succession.  Fouche  and  his  police  hastily  diverted  their  en- 
ergies from  hunting  down  plotters  against  the  First  Consul 
to  forwarding  a  plot  of  their  own  against  the  Republic.  Five 
days  after  the  death  of  the  Duke  d'Enghien,  several  electoral 
colleges  obediently  responded  to  their  instructions  and  laid 
at  the  feet  of  Napoleon  their  appeals  that  his  authority  might 
be  perpetuated  in  his  family. 

The  great  conspiracy  that  was  still  agitating  the  country 
served  well  to  make  the  nation  feel  its  dependence  on  one  mor- 
tal life,  which  might  be  cut  off  in  an  instant  and  leave  the 
country  plunged  in  chaos.  ' '  This  work  we  do,  this  money  we 
risk,"  the  people  are  represented  as  saying,  "this  house  we 
build,  these  trees  we  plant — what  will  become  of  them  if  Na- 
poleon dies  ? ' '  Establish  a  dynasty  and  the  royalist  assassins 
would  see  the  uselessness  of  striking  down  the  head  of  the 
government,  with  a  long  line  of  heirs  standing  behind  him, 
and  would  cease  to  disturb  the  land.  Moreover,  set  up  a 
throne  and  monarchial  Europe  would  no  longer  band  against 
France  as  a  menace  to  kings. 

The  Republic  was  dead — long  live  Napoleon! 


CHAPTER  XXI 
TWICE  CROWNED 

1804-1805      AGE   34-35 

ALL  the  world's  a  stage,  and  for  twenty  brilliant  sea- 
sons Napoleon  was  the  stage  manager.  When  his 
audience,  which  comprised  mankind,  had  grown  weary 
of  the  melodrama  and  tragedy  of  revolutions  and  wars  and 
murderous  plots,  he  relieved  the  tension  by  putting  on,  in  the 
season  of  1804—05,  that  spectacular  production  which  is  known 
to  history  as  the  Coronation  of  Napoleon  and  Josephine. 
Only  the  unparalleled  dramatic  gifts  of  the  star  performer 
could  have  saved  such  a  wild  extravaganza  from  degenerating 
into  a  farce,  and  a  venerable  archbishop  who  took  part  in  it 
confessed  that  if  any  one  in  the  house  had  laughed,  the  show 
would  have  been  roared  off  the  boards, 

A  novelty-loving  world  looked  on  spellbound  as  France  sud- 
denly was  transformed,  like  a  lightning-change  artist,  from  a 
spartan  Republic  into  a  gilded  Empire,  and  her  fanatical 
patriots  and  Terrorists  into  humble  but  gaudy  courtiers,  while 
the  horrid  guillotine,  as  if  by  magic,  was  changed  into  a 
sumptuous  throne,  the  bloody  pike  into  a  golden  sceptre  and 
the  red  cap  of  the  Revolution  into  a  glittering  crown. 

Even  more  amazing  still  was  the  versatility  displayed  by  the 
actors  in  the  principal  roles.  The  little  charity  boy  of  the 
King  at  Brienne  twenty  years  before,  the  hungering,  melan- 
choly, wandering  alien  in  the  street  of  Paris  only  ten  years 
before,  strutted  upon  the  stage  in  imperial  robes  as  if  born 
in  the  purple.  And  his  wife,  an  alien  like  himself,  who  was 
but  yesterday  an  imprisoned  and  penniless  widow,  looked  her 
queenly  part  to  perfection  as  she  came  on.  followed  by  a  train 
of    princes    and    princesses,    who,    a    decade    ago,    had    been 

167 


168     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

stranded  on  the  shore  of  France,  poverty-stricken  refugees 
from  the  then  semibarbarous  Island  of  Corsica. 

The  curtain  raiser  of  the  imperial  drama  was  only  a  mario- 
nette show,  with  Fouche,  that  glorified  plain  clothes  man, 
pulling  the  strings  while  the  puppets  of  the  legislative  body 
went  through  the  motions  of  offering  the  crown.  The  sena- 
tors ran  from  their  chambers,  leaped  into  their  carriages  and 
raced  out  to  the  palace  of  St.  Cloud  in  the  tumultuous  eager- 
ness of  each  to  be  first  at  the  foot  of  the  new  Csesar.  There 
they  found  him  in  simple  military  uniform  with  Josephine 
beside  him,  and,  addressing  the  General  of  yesterday  as 
"Sire,"  they  duly  proclaimed  "Napoleon  Bonaparte,  Em- 
peror of  the  French, ' '  whereat  the  cry  of  ' '  Long  live  the  Em- 
peror" rang  through  the  palace  halls  and  was  echoed  by  a 
swarm  of  suitors  in  the  garden.  A  gay  cavalcade  next  ap- 
peared in  various  squares  of  Paris,  where  with  the  blare  of 
trumpets  they  acclaimed  Napoleon,  Emperor,  to  idly  curious 
and  sometimes  laughing  crowds  which  at  the  suggestion  of  a 
monarchy  a  few  years  before  would  have  drenched  those  very 
streets  with  blood. 

Last  of  all,  and  when  the  Empire  really  had  been  estab- 
lished three  months,  the  wishes  of  the  country  were  consulted 
on  the  proposal  to  make  "Napoleon  Bonaparte  Emperor  of 
the  French  and  the  imperial  dignity  hereditary  in  his  natural 
or  adopted  descent  and  in  the  descent  from  his  brothers  Joseph 
and  Louis."  The  heirs  of  Lucien  and  Jerome  were  excluded 
from  the  line  of  succession  because  those  two  Bonapartes  had 
lately  married  to  suit  themselves  and  not  their  brother. 

Meanwhile  Napoleon  had  forsaken  the  camp  of  his  army  and 
forgotten  his  projected  invasion  of  England  in  his  attention 
to  his  multitude  of  duties  as  stage  director,  costumer,  car- 
penter, and  property  man  of  the  great  burlesque  which  he  was 
busily  preparing.  'Tis  a  pity,  but  it  must  be  said  in  frank- 
ness that  his  scenario  was  wholly  devoid  of  invention  and 
that  his  stage  business  was  altogether  old  and  hackneyed. 

Prudent  nature  imposed  sharp  limitations  on  this  giant  to 
save  the  world  from  his  thrall.  For  in  showering  her  gifts 
upon  him  she  withheld  two  qualities  which,  omitted,  bound 


TWICE  CROWNED  169 

the  voyage  of  his  wonderful  life  in  shallows  and  miseries. 
He  lacked  originality  and  he  had  no  real  sense  of  humour. 

Had  he  been  original,  he  would  have  planned  his  corona- 
tion in  keeping  with  the  Revolution  and  the  Republic,  whose 
creature  he  was,  and  made  it  imposing  by  its  simplicity. 
Had  he  been  endowed  with  a  wholesome  sense  of  humour,  he 
would  not  have  disclosed  his  parvenu  spirit  by  striving  vainly 
to  hide  his  demorcratic  origin  in  a  wrapping  of  tinsel  and 
by  aping  with  Simian  tricks  the  meaningless  ceremonials  of 
the  dead  past. 

Anxious  to  disguise  all  his  associates  as  well  as  himself,  he 
suddenly  made  over  his  brothers,  Joseph  and  Louis,  their 
wives,  Julie  Clary  and  Hortense  Beauharnais,  and  his  own 
sisters  into  princes  and  princesses.  He  tricked  out  uncle 
Fesch,  now  Cardinal,  as  grand  almoner,  and  arrayed  eighteen 
generals,  all  good  republican  products,  in  the  trappings  of 
marshals  of  the  Empire,  while  his  two  colleagues  in  the  Con- 
sulate, Cambaceres  and  LeBrun,  became  arch  chancellor  and 
arch  treasurer,  and  Talleyrand  grand  chancellor. 

He  commanded  Berthier  to  exchange  the  proud  rank  of 
general,  won  on  the  field  of  battle,  for  the  absurdity  of  grand 
master  of  the  hounds,  and  he  concealed  General  Duroc  be- 
neath the  designation  of  grand  marshal  of  the  palace,  while 
Caulaincourt,  able  statesman,  became  the  imperial  hostler,  or 
master  of  the  horse.  As  he  saw  those  sons  of  the  Revolution 
parading  about  in  their  imperial  livery,  he  laughed  in  his 
sleeve :  ' '  All  I  have  to  do  is  to  put  a  little  gold  braid  on  my 
virtuous  republicans  and  instantly  they  become  whatever  I 
please  to  make  them." 

Men  who  but  yesterday  would  have  bent  their  necks  to  the 
guillotine  rather  than  bend  their  knees  to  a  monarch  were  as 
supple  in  their  hinges  as  if  their  lives  had  been  passed  in 
loafing  about  a  throne.  Napoleon  oscillated  between  admira- 
tion and  contempt  for  his  fawning  courtiers,  but  when  he 
chaffed  Fouche  for  having  been  one  of  the  men  who  sent 
King  Louis  XVI  to  his  death  he  received  from  the  regicide  a 
keener  thrust:  "Yes,  Sire;  that  was  the  firet  service  I  had 
the  happiness  of  rendering  to  Your  Majesty." 


170  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Napoleon's  cynicism  was  touched,  too,  by  the  readiness  of 
the  haughty  members  of  the  ancient  aristocracy  to  prostrate 
themselves  before  the  new  throne  ere  its  gilding  was  dry. 
"I  showed  them  the  path  to  glory  and  they  would  not  tread 
it,"  he  said.  "I  opened  my  anteroom  and  they  rushed 
through  the  door  in  crowds."  Not  a  few  of  the  old  nobles 
and  grande  dames  were  eager  applicants  for  palace  places. 
They  were  set  to  work  drilling  the  awkward  squad  of  the  new 
court,  teaching  the  raw  recruits  from  the  peasantry  and  the 
lower  middle  class  the  proper  way  to  enter  and  back  out  of 
a  room,  curtsey,  speak,  manage  their  trains  or  hold  their  hats. 

Encouraged  by  his  success  with  the  stars  in  the  cast,  he 
next  showered  the  crosses  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  on  the 
chorus  and  the  supernumeraries,  when,  on  the  great  day  of 
the  nation,  the  14th  of  July,  nobles  and  hinds  knelt  before 
him  in  an  equality  of  vanity.  An  intoxication  of  ambition 
for  personal  glory  and  selfish  reward  spread  over  France, 
which  had  poured  forth  the  mightiest  armies  of  modern  times, 
raised  up  peasants  to  be  conquerors  of  dukes  and  princes, 
and  fought  all  Europe  single-handed  for  ten  years  with- 
out ottering  any  other  prize  than  the  honour  of  serving 
the  Republic  in  hunger  and  rags.  Now,  however,  that  "Our 
Country"  had  become  "My  Empire,"  "Our  Government" 
"My  Throne,"  "Our  Army"  "My  Army,"  and  "We,  the 
People,"  had  become  "My  Subjects,"  men  no  longer  sweat 
for  duty,  but  only  for  promotion.  The  manhood  of  the  nation 
was  lost  in  the  mad  scramble  to  receive  the  new  guinea  stamp 
of  rank. 

Discarding  his  Corsican  ancestry,  the  new  monarch  chose 
an  entirely  ditt'erent  set  of  forbears.  Even  the  Bourbons 
were  not  deemed  suitable  progenitors,  and  when  it  was  sug- 
gested that  he  should  take  the  old  title  of  King  of  France,  he 
remarked,  "I  do  not  succeed  Louis  XIV,  but  Charlemagne." 
Accordingly  he  solemnly  made  an  imperial  progress  to  the 
tomb  of  his  new-found  and  illustrious  forefather  at  Aix  la 
Chapelle. 

Having  chosen  the  great  Emperor  of  the  Franks  as  his 
ancestor,  he  determined  to  imitate  the  principal  feature  of  the 


TWICE  CROWNED  171 

Carlovingian  coronation  and  be  anointed  by  the  Vicar  of 
Christ.  He  would  even  better  the  example.  Charlemagne 
went  to  Rome  to  be  crowned  in  St.  Peter's  by  Leo  III.  The 
new  Charlemagne  made  Rome  come  to  Paris  and  Pius  VII 
crown  him  in  Notre  Dame. 

The  grey  walls  of  Notre  Dame  had  risen  for  600  years  and 
more  from  the  "Island  of  the  City,"  where,  in  the  middle 
of  the  Seine,  Csesar  found  a  cluster  of  savage  huts  that  con- 
stituted the  Paris  of  twenty  centuries  ago.  A  jumble  of  old 
buildings  shut  in  the  great  cathedral  and  Napoleon  ordered 
those  structures  to  be  torn  down  right  and  left  to  clear  the 
way  for  the  imperial  procession.  The  work  of  demolition  was 
pressed  by  day  and  night.  New  platforms  and  galleries  were 
hastily  erected  within  the  church.  Streets  were  paved  and 
all  Paris  was  filled  with  the  chorus  of  hammers. 

Workmen  took  advantage  of  the  great  demand  for  labour 
to  extort  unheard-of  wages,  amounting  to  as  much  as  65,  75, 
and  even  80  cents  a  day.  Dressmakers,  tailors,  and  milliners, 
goldsmiths,  and  jewellers  did  a  rushing  business. 

The  making  of  crests,  a  lost  art  since  the  Revolution, 
flourished  once  more.  Napoleon  adopted  the  eagle  of  Charle- 
magne for  the  standards  of  his  legions  and  the  bee  as  his  per- 
sonal emblem,  scattering  swarms  of  bees  over  his  ensign  and 
escutcheon,  his  palace  carpets  and  draperies.  The  only  me- 
mento of  his  native  Corsica  that  appears  to  have  interested 
him  was  its  emblematic  colour,  green,  which  he  adopted  for 
the  livery  of  the  Empire,  a  choice  that  is  perpetuated  to  this 
day  in  the  national  flag  of  Italy. 

Isabey,  the  artist,  was  ordered,  on  the  eve  of  the  coronation, 
to  prepare  seven  drawings  in  colours  of  the  seven  scenes  to  be 
enacted  at  Notre  Dame.  It  was  an  impossible  feat  within 
the  limits  of  time.  But  the  resourceful  artist  purchased  all 
the  dolls  in  Paris  and,  dressing  them  up  as  Emperor,  Empress, 
Pope,  princes,  chamberlains,  equerries,  ladies  of  honour,  and 
the  rest,  he  arranged  them  on  a  little  stage  that  was  a  minia- 
ture of  the  church  interior.  Napoleon  was  delighted  with 
this  clever  plan  and,  calling  in  the  various  actors  and  actresses 
in  his  cast,  he  personally  taught  them  their  proper  positions. 


172     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

A  grave  crisis  arose  as  the  Pope  neared  Paris  in  his  journey 
from  Rome  over  the  newly  constructed  Mt.  Cenis  highway. 
Where  and  how  should  His  Majesty  receive  His  Holiness? 
In  his  new  exaltation  Napoleon  was  extremely  anxious  not  to 
place  himself  in  a  position  where  he  would  have  to  take  second 
place  even  to  the  Pope.  It  was  decided,  in  keeping  with  the 
merely  theatrical  character  of  the  entire  coronation,  that  he 
should  go  hunting  and  meet  the  Pope  informally  and  by 
chance. 

While  pretending  to  be  taking  part  in  a  hunt  in  the  im- 
perial forest  of  Fontainebleau  he  affected  to  be  surprised  by 
the  arrival  of  the  papal  party,  numbering  more  than  one  hun- 
dred persons.  He  dismounted,  the  Pope  stepped  out  of  his 
carriage,  and  they  embraced,  after  which  one  of  the  imperial 
carriages  drove  up.  The  Emperor  entered  it  before  the  Pope, 
but  he  took  the  seat  on  the  farther  side,  which  procedure  had 
its  compensation  for  the  Pontiff,  since  it  left  him  the  seat  on 
the  right. 

Pius,  an  amiable  and  benevolent  character,  was  determined 
to  make  the  best  of  every  situation  and  not  to  bicker  with 
the  Emperor.  Although  he  had  supposed  that  his  long  jour- 
ney was  for  the  purpose  of  placing  the  crown  on  Napoleon's 
head,  he  cheerfully  consented  to  let  him  crown  himself,  as  the 
Emperor  was  determined  to  receive  the  crown  from  no  other 
hands  than  his  own.  When  he  recoiled  from  the  communion 
as  a  sacrilege,  since  he  could  not  partake  of  it  in  a  spirit  of 
sincerity,  the  Pontiff  consented  to  its  omission,  respecting  his 
scruples,  probably  glad  to  find  he  had  any  in  church  matters. 

The  Pope  was  immovable,  however,  on  questions  that  he  re- 
garded as  moral,  and  carried  his  point  every  time.  There 
was  one  very  important  condition  which  he  insisted  upon  from 
the  outset.  Napoleon  had  resolved  upon  having  Josephine 
crowned,  although  none  of  the  Bourbon  queens  had  received 
such  an  honour  since  Marie  de  Medici  200  years  before. 

Yet  he  had  no  wife  in  the  eyes  of  the  church,  his  wedding 
having  taken  place  in  the  Revolution,  when  there  were  no 
religious  marriages  in  France.  The  Pope  firmly  announced 
that  unless  he  and  Josephine  went  through  a  religious  cere- 


TWICE  CROWNED  173 

mony  the  church  could  have  no  part  in  her  coronation.  The 
imperial  will  was  slow  to  bend,  but  in  the  end  and  only  on 
the  eve  of  the  coronation  Napoleon  and  Josephine  knelt  before 
Cardinal  Fesch. 

After  eight  years  their  union  had  received  the  sanction  of 
the  church  and  the  Empress  no  doubt  rose  from  the  Cardinal's 
blessing  with  a  new  feeling  of  security,  for  was  not  the  Em- 
peror bound  to  her  now  by  a  tie  that  no  man  could  put  asun- 
der? Napoleon's  desire  to  have  her  crowned,  however,  would 
seem  to  be  assurance  enough  that  he  had  yet  no  intention  of 
sundering  it,  and  as  his  thoughts  harked  back  to  their  first 
wedding  he  laughed  at  the  notary,  now  the  imperial  notary, 
who  had  advised  Josephine  against  marrying  a  man  with 
nothing  but  a  cloak  and  a  sword;  the  cloak  had  been  dyed 
purple  and  the  sword  was  Charlemagne 's ! 

As  they  were  breakfasting  on  the  morning  of  the  great  day, 
December  2,  1804,  Napoleon  placed  the  crown  on  Josephine's 
head  that  he  might  enjoy  the  pretty  sight  over  their  coffee 
and  rolls.  The  Pope  was  already  starting  for  Notre  Dame, 
with  his  cross  bearer  riding  ahead  on  a  mule  in  accordance 
with  the  ancient  papal  custom. 

It  was  ten  o'clock  when  Murat  led  the  carbineers,  cuiras- 
siers, chasseurs,  and  the  mamelukes — reminders  of  the  Egyp- 
tian campaign — out  of  the  courtyard  of  the  Tuileries,  followed 
by  the  heralds  at  arms  and  the  carriages  of  the  masters  of  the 
ceremonies,  the  grand  officers  of  the  Empire,  the  great  digni- 
taries and  the  princesses. 

Then  in  solitary  state,  came  a  gilded  carriage  with  a  crown 
atop,  its  eight  horses  in  resplendent  harnesses  driven  by  Caesar, 
the  coachman,  w^ho  had  galloped  to  safety  past  the  infernal 
machine.  Pages  in  green  and  gold  were  perched  behind, 
while  all  about  pranced  the  horses  of  the  aides-de-camp. 
Within  sat  Napoleon,  two  white  aigrettes  nodding  above  his 
black  velvet  cap,  surrounded  with  a  band  of  diamonds,  clasped 
together  by  the  celebrated  $2,000,000  Regent  solitaire.  His 
purple  cloak  showed  its  white  satin  lining  as  it  hung  from  his 
left  shoulder,  and  beneath  it  was  a  coat  of  purple  velvet  faced 
with  white  and  glittering  with  gems  and  gold.     His  waistcoat 


174  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

was  buttoned  with  diamonds,  while  gold  embroidered  white 
velvet  breeches  reached  to  the  diamond  garters  of  his  gold 
embroidered  silk  stockings,  whose  clocks  bore  the  imperial 
coronet.  His  $80  pair  of  velvet  boots  with  diamond  buckles 
were  white  as  snow  and  gleaming  with  gold. 

No  operatic  tenor  could  have  outshone  the  Little  Corporal 
that  proud  day,  when  he  exulted  to  his  brother,  "Joseph,  if 
father  could  only  see  us ! "  Yet  mother  did  not  deign  to  be  a 
looker-on  at  the  show! 

Beside  the  Emperor  sat  Josephine,  in  whose  smiling  face 
no  trace  of  age  had  been  left  by  her  skilful  maids.  Her  white 
satin  gown  was  trimmed  with  silver  and  gold  and  sprinkled 
over  with  golden  bees.  Diamonds  sparkled  on  her  head,  on 
her  neck,  in  her  ears  and  in  her  girdle.  Facing  the  imperial 
couple  were  the  Princes  Joseph  and  Louis. 

The  80,000  soldiers  assembled  in  the  city  for  the  corona- 
tion, left  little  room  in  the  streets  for  the  people  who  were 
not  largely  represented,  and  seldom  was  a  cheer  raised. 

As  Napoleon  passed  the  Church  of  St.  Roch  in  the  Rue  St. 
Honore  he  could  see  the  first  flight  in  the  steps  he  was  climb- 
ing to  the  throne ;  for  by  those  steps  of  St.  Roch,  the  Man  on 
Horseback  became  master  of  Paris  nine  years  before. 

In  the  archbishop's  palace  b}"  the  cathedral,  the  imperial 
couple  changed  to  their  coronation  costumes.  Napoleon  put- 
ting on  a  circlet  of  gold  laurel  leaves  and  getting  into  a  white 
satin  petticoat!  Next  he  donned  an  eighty-pound  purple 
robe  and  cape,  ermine  lined  and  covered  with  golden  bees, 
while  Josephine  put  on  a  highly  embroidered  velvet  mantle, 
twenty  ells  in  length,  and  with  $2000  worth  of  ermine  for  its 
lining.  This  robe,  which  was  draped  to  leave  her  bust  un- 
covered and  her  figure  free,  was  fastened  to  her  left  shoulder 
and  held  in  place  by  a  clasp  at  her  golden  girdle  studded  with 
rose  coloured  gems.  Her  crown  had  eight  branches,  set  with 
diamonds,  banded  by  eight  large  emeralds,  while  amethysts 
shone  from  the  bandeau  on  her  brow,  and  four  rows  of  mag- 
nificent pearls,  entwined  with  diamond  covered  leaves  formed 
her  diadem.  In  all  she  wore  on  her  pretty  head  $250,000 
worth  of  pearls  and  diamonds. 


TWICE  CROWNED  175 

Meanwhile  the  great  throng  of  nearly  twenty  thousand 
shivered  in  the  cold  cathedral  as  they  waited  and  watched  for 
the  next  scene  to  be  enacted  within  its  walls,  where  in  less 
than  a  decade  the  "torch  of  truth"  had  blazed  on  the  vener- 
able altar  and  a  ballet  dancer  had  been  enthroned  in  the  choir 
to  be  worshipped  as  the  ' '  goddess  of  reason. ' ' 

Probably  no  other  bosom  in  the  immense  assemblage  felt 
the  same  emotions  as  that  which  had  nursed  the  Emperor. 
For  he  had  not  forgotten  his  foster  mother  but  had  brought 
Camilla  Ilari  from  Corsica  and  installed  her  in  a  post  of 
honour  where  she  could  see  her  "little  Nabulionello"  put  on 
the  crown  of  empire. 

It  was  almost  noon,  when  at  last  the  heralds  and  pages  ap- 
peared at  the  portal  of  the  church,  followed  by  the  marshals 
of  the  Empire.  Those  war  dogs  of  the  fallen  Republic  came 
in  with  mincing  steps,  one  laden  with  a  cushion  on  which  lay 
Josephine's  ring,  another  a  basket  for  her  cloak,  another  her 
crown  on  a  cushion. 

Then  entered  Josephine,  her  imperial  self,  between  her  first 
chamberlain  and  her  first  equerry,  with  the  Bonaparte  prin- 
cesses holding  up  her  robe  and  looking  like  captives  at  a 
chariot's  wheel.  Walking  behind  with  courtly  tread  was 
Mme.  de  Lavelette,  daughter  of  that  Fanny  Beauharnais  who 
had  befriended  Josephine  when  she  was  the  neglected  wife 
of  Fanny's  nephew,  and  a  stranger  in  France.  Beside  her 
marched  an  uncomely,  unfortunate  hunchback,  but  this  was 
Mme.  de  la  Rochefaucauld  and  perhaps  the  only  person  in  the 
entire  imperial  suite  who  ever  had  stepped  foot  in  the  old 
court  of  France. 

Next  there  came  more  war  dogs  carrying  Napoleon's  trin- 
kets, and  then  the  Emperor,  grasping  in  one  of  his  gold-em- 
broidered gloves  "the  hand  of  justice,"  while  in  the  other  he 
held  the  sceptre  with  an  eagle  perched  on  top  of  it.  Joseph 
and  Louis,  Cambaceres  and  LeBrun  followed  him  as  they  held 
up  his  burdensome  robe,  and  the  cry  of  "Vive  rEmpereur!" 
rang  through  the  groined  aisles  of  the  vast  and  lofty  edifice. 

As  Napoleon  made  his  bow  to  the  Pope  he  touched  the  gos- 
pels with  both  hands.     Then  he  and  Josephine  descended  and 


176  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

knelt  at  the  foot  of  the  altar,  where  the  Pontiff  anointed 
their  heads  and  hands.  The  Emperor  put  on  his  ring,  sword 
and  crown,  and  next  bent  over  to  crown  the  Empress  who 
was  kneeling  at  his  feet.  The  religious  ceremony  was  finished 
Avith  a  kiss  from  the  Pope  on  Napoleon's  cheek  and  his  bene- 
diction, "May  the  Emperor  live  forever!" 

A  herald-at-arms  now  proclaimed  "the  most  glorious  and 
august  Emperor  Napoleon,"  who,  however,  was  still  boyish 
enough  to  prod  uncle  Fesch  with  his  sceptre  as  he  was  leaving 
the  scene. 

The  grandiose  spectacle  was  at  an  end.  Soon  Notre  Dame 
was  wrapped  again  in  the  solemn  stillness  of  the  centuries, 

Muffled    and    dumb    like    barefoot    dervishes, 
And   marching    single   in    an    endless    file. 

Only  a  solitary  lamp  lit  the  dusk  of  the  waning  day  in  the 
great  nave,  haunted  by  the  ghostly  past,  where  above  all  the 
echoes  of  the  ages  there  still  resounds  Pius'  invocation,  "  Vivat 
Imperator  in  etemum." 

At  Napoleon's  appearance  in  Milan  in  May,  1805,  to  be 
crowned  King  of  Italy,  the  Milanese  outdid  the  Parisians  at 
his  French  coronation.  No  recollection  of  heavy  sacrifices  in 
a  great  revolution  for  the  overthrow  of  a  monarchy  cast  its 
shadow  upon  the  Italians  as  they  rejoiced  at  the  setting  up 
of  a  new  throne.  Besides,  was  not  their  new  sovereign  an 
Italian  like  themselves? 

To  grace  the  brow  of  the  new  King  of  Italy  the  famous 
crown  of  the  Lombards  was  brought  forth.  That  precious 
heirloom  of  the  ages  is  jealously  guarded  behind  no  less  than 
six  locks  in  a  casket  with  doors  of  silver  and  steel  beneath  a 
marble  canopy  in  the  cathedral  of  the  royal  town  of  Monza, 
a  few  miles  out  of  I\Iilan.  There  curious  pilgrims  may  mount 
a  platform  and  look  down  upon  the  rude  coronet  of  the  Long- 
beards,  all  gold  and  gems  except  for  a  slender  inner  band  of 
iron,  which  tradition  says  was  made  from  a  nail  of  the 
Saviour's  crucifixion. 

It  was  not  in  that  simple  old  church  of  Monza,  however, 
that  Napoleon  was  consecrated,  but  with  all  pomp  in  the  beau- 


TWICE  CROWNED  177 

tiful  cathedral  of  Milan,  from  whose  noble  altar  he  took  the 
iron  crown  to  place  it  upon  his  head  with  his  own  hands. 

So  pleased  was  he  with  his  performance  in  that  last  scene 
of  his  great  spectacular  drama  that  he  exclaimed  on  returning 
to  the  palace,  ''Well,  did  you  see  the  ceremony?  Did  you 
hear  what  I  said  when  I  placed  the  crown  on  my  head?" 
And  he  lifted  his  voice  in  imitation  of  the  tones  that  had  rung 
through  the  cathedral,  ' '  God  has  given  it  to  me.  Woe  to  him 
who  shall  touch  it ! " 


CHAPTER  XXII 

THE  UNCONQUERED  SEA 

1801-1805     AGE  32-36 

THE  green  lea  that  crowns  with  the  velvet  turf  of  Eng- 
land the  chalk  cliffs  of  Folkestone  is  hardly  lost  to  the 
view  of  the  passengers  by  the  steamer  that  is  bearing 
them  to  the  shore  of  France,  when  they  see  a  tall  and  beautiful 
Doric  column  rising  from  the  sand  dunes  of  Boulogne.  That 
shining  white  obelisk  is  the  boundary  stone  of  the  Empire  of 
Napoleon,  and  on  its  top  stands  the  bronze  effigy  of  the  man 
who  spent  fifteen  years  of  his  life  in  a  futile  effort  to  cross 
the  English  Channel. 

As  the  boat  draws  nearer  the  end  of  its  voyage  from  the 
English  isle  to  the  continent  of  Europe,  the  ruined  tower  of 
Caligula  is  seen  on  the  brow  of  the  yellow  heights,  where  the 
legionaries  of  Rome  planted  it  in  the  fortieth  year  of  the 
Christian  era.  Hard  by,  the  conscripts  of  Napoleon  reared 
for  him  a  timbered  palace  in  the  third  year  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  where  he  could  dwell  in  the  midst  of  his  nearly  two 
hundred  thousand  warriors  who  were  ready  at  his  nod  to  bear 
him  on  their  arms  into  the  palace  of  St.  James.  And  down 
alongside  the  quay,  where  the  Folkestone  steamer  now  ties  up, 
1000  boats  waited  to  ferry  them  over  the  twenty-nine  miles  of 
water  that  rolled  between  them  and  their  goal.  Some  of  the 
craft  are  afloat  to  this  day,  the  barelegged  fisherwomen  of  the 
old  town  insist,  and  are  numbered  among  their  herring  fleet. 
But  they  have  never  crossed  the  channel  and  grated  on  an 
English  beach ! 

The  Peace  of  Amiens,  which  really  was  no  peace  at  all,  but 
a  mere  truce  in  an  age-old,  irrepressible  conflict  between 
France  and  England,  had  lasted  less  than  fourteen  months, 
vrhen  the  clash  of  arms  was  renewed.     It  was  only  the  resump- 

178 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEA  179 

tion  of  a  vendetta  which  had  embroiled  the  two  countries  since 
the  Norman  conquest  and  in  pursuit  of  which  they  had  hunted 
each  other  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  from  the  Ganges  to  the 
St,  Lawrence  and  from  Yorktown  to  Acre. 

When,  like  two  winded  pugilists,  they  agreed  in  the  Treaty 
of  Amiens  to  lay  aside  the  gloves  after  ten  years  in  the  ring, 
the  old  score  was  left  unsettled,  with  one  the  mistress  of  the 
ocean,  with  one  the  master  of  the  land  and  each  at  the  mercy 
of  the  other.  The  French  shore  was  England's  door  stoop 
on  the  European  continent,  while  the  British  Isles  and  the 
British  rock  of  Gibraltar  were  the  gateposts  on  the  lanes  that 
led  from  France  to  the  highway  of  the  sea. 

England,  with  immense  dominions  beyond  the  ocean,  had 
all  but  stripped  the  French  of  their  once  great  colonial  em- 
pire, while  France  dominated  Europe  as  never  before. 

The  British  protested  against  Napoleon's  annexation  of 
Piedmont  and  his  active  influence  in  Switzerland,  where  he 
was  making  over  the  Swiss  Confederation  into  the  modern 
republic  that  we  know  to-day.  The  jealousy  of  the  London 
statesmen  was  aroused  to  the  greenest  hue  when  they  saw  him, 
by  invitation  of  the  German  states,  acting  as  mediator  be- 
tween them,  and  remaking  the  map  of  Germany. 

In  the  midst  of  the  quarrel,  England  had  faithfully  carried 
out  her  treaty  agreement  to  restore  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope 
to  the  Dutch  and  relinquish  Egypt  to  the  Turks.  She  also 
sent  home  at  her  own  expense  the  remnant  of  Napoleon's 
Egyptian  army,  which  she  had  captured  when  she  took  the 
country.  She  continued,  however,  to  hold  on  to  JMalta,  and 
Napoleon  insisted  that  England  must  not  remain  in  control 
of  that  key  to  the  eastern  Llediterranean. 

In  the  end,  the  controversy  thus  narrowed  down  to  the  pos- 
session of  a  barren  rock  twenty  miles  long  and  nine  miles  wide. 
In  the  temper  that  had  been  aroused  on  both  sides  any  bone 
would  suffice  to  bring  on  a  fight. 

The  war  began  in  Josephine's  salon  at  the  Tuileries  one 
Sunday  afternoon.  When  Napoleon  entered  the  circle  which 
had  formed  in  the  drawing-room,  he  walked  up  to  Robert  R. 
Livingston,  the  American  minister,  and  made  a  few  pleasant 


180     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

remarks,  after  which  he  strode  over  to  Lord  Whitworth,  the 
British  ambassador.  ' '  So, ' '  he  demanded  of  the  Briton  in  his 
deepest  tone,  ' '  you  are  determined  to  go  to  war  1 ' ' 

A  diplomat  being  a  gentleman  who  is  sent  abroad  to  lie 
for  his  country,  the  ambassador  insisted,  of  course,  that  his 
nation  was  only  desirous  of  peace.  But  the  First  Consul,  in 
angry  accents,  insisted  that  England  was  not  keeping  her 
promises  and  was  plotting  to  bring  on  hostilities.  "Why  these 
preparations  for  war?"  he  sternly  inquired.  ''Against  whom 
are  you  taking  these  measures?  ,  .  .  But  if  you  arm,  I  shall 
also  arm.  If  you  will  fight,  I  shall  also  fight.  You  may  pos- 
sibly destroy  France,  but  you  never  can  intimidate  her!" 
As  the  First  Consul  left  the  room,  he  repeated,  "Woe  to  them 
who  do  not  respect  their  treaties!" 

When  the  door  closed  behind  him,  it  closed  upon  the  Peace 
of  Amiens  and  the  peace  of  the  world.  Thus  began,  in  the 
spring  of  1803,  the  titanic  war  which  was  to  draw  into  its  vor- 
tex all  the  nations,  until  the  battle  line  should  stretch  from 
Moscow  to  Detroit,  and  end  only  at  Waterloo  in  1815, 

Shortly  after  the  opening  of  hostilities.  Napoleon  pitched  his 
camp  at  Boulogne  in  sight  of  the  chalk  cliffs  of  Albion  and  for 
two  years  he  bent  his  giant  energies  to  the  formation  of  the 
mightiest  invading  fleet  ever  launched  against  England. 
Boasting  that  he  would  "jump  the  ditch,"  he  declared  that 
Cffisar's  expedition  was  "child's  play,"  and  that  "mine  is 
the  enterprise  of  the  Titans. ' '  The  Roman  had  only  800  boats 
but  the  Corsican  commanded  that  there  should  be  built  for 
him  no  less  than  2000  boats. 

In  one  respect  and  the  most  important,  the  latest  invader 
could  not  claim  any  superiority  to  that  first  recorded  invader 
of  England.  After  1800  years  had  passed  since  Csesar's  in- 
vasion. Napoleon  still  must  depend  on  sails  and  oars  to  carry 
him  across  the  channel,  as  the  invention  of  aerial,  steam  and 
submarine  navigation  was  then  only  faintly  dawning. 

While  Robert  Fulton,  with  his  plans  for  steamboats  and 
torpedoes,  vainly  offered  his  inventions  to  the  two  powers  that 
were  struggling  for  the  mastery  of  the  waters,  Napoleon's  ship- 
yards were  busily  launching  his  cockle  shells  and  he  restlessly 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEA  181 

moved  up  and  down  the  coast,  which  he  lined  from  Havre  to 
Antwerp  with  sentries,  cannon  and  telegraphic  semaphores. 
The  "Army  of  England,''  as  he  called  his  invading  force,  was 
daily  put  through  drills  in  embarking  and  disembarking  until 
every  man  knew  his  boat  and  his  place  in  it  and  25,000  could 
clamber  aboard  in  ten  minutes. 

On  the  other  side  the  channel,  the  "Great  Terror"  held 
England  in  its  grip.  Had  not  this  Corsican  imp  raced  twice 
through  British  fleets  over  the  1400  miles  of  blue  water  be- 
tween France  and  Egypt?  Had  he  not  leaped  the  Alps? 
Could  a  few  miles  of  sea  set  bounds  to  his  activity? 

While  the  credulous  peasantry  shivered  as  they  listened  to 
stories  of  his  having  already  landed  and,  like  a  wild  man, 
secreted  himself  in  the  haunted  depths  of  the  neighbouring 
woods,  where  he  only  awaited  his  good  time  to  pounce  upon 
them,  the  King  "in  daily  expectation  that  Bonaparte  will  at- 
tempt his  threatened  invasion,"  as  George  III  wrote,  made 
provision  for  the  flight  of  the  royal  family  beyond  the  Severn. 
The  army  of  defence  was  quickly  swollen  to  300,000  and 
400,000  by  zealous  patriots  determined  to  make  good  Bri- 
tannia's dearest  boast  that  "Britons  never  shall  be  slaves," 
and  when  the  supply  of  muskets  was  exhausted  by  the  volun- 
teers, they  grasped  pikes,  and  even  pitchforks. 

Huge  piles  of  combustibles  were  made  ready  to  be  turned 
into  bonfires  as  a  signal  of  the  approach  of  the  nation's  ogre. 
Forts  sprang  up  about  London,  and  some  of  the  seventy-five 
martello  watch  towers  which  were  erected  on  the  coast  still 
may  be  seen. 

All  the  while  a  cordon  of  British  ships  of  war,  "those  raven- 
ing wolves  of  the  sea,"  as  Napoleon  called  them,  was  drawn 
about  the  terrified  land.  But  there  was  not  a  French  naval 
vessel  afloat  in  the  Channel.  The  French  warships  were  all 
sealed  up  in  the  harbours  of  the  Atlantic  and  the  ]\Iediter- 
ranean,  with  English  blockading  fleets  at  every  harbour  mouth. 

How,  then,  could  an  army  cross  the  Channel  and  land  on 
the  English  shore  ?  History  cannot  keep  a  straight  face  while 
recording  Napoleon's  solution  of  the  problem.  "Eight  hours 
of  calm  or  fog,"  he  said,  "will  decide  the  fate  of  the  uni- 


182     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

verse."  If  the  waters  would  be  still  that  long,  he  argued 
that  his  invading  hosts  could  row  across  while  the  British 
ships  lay  becalmed  and  helpless  spectators  of  his  descent  upon 
the  doomed  island.  On  the  other  hand,  if  fortune  should 
choose  to  cover  the  waters  with  a  fog,  he  contended  that  his 
2000  boats  could  dodge  through  the  enemy's  fleet. 

Some  historians  rejecting  all  that  mad  folly,  which  Na- 
poleon talked  for  two  years  as  he  paced  to  and  fro  beside  his 
telescope  levelled  at  Dover  castle,  have  persuaded  themselves 
that  his  whole  scheme  of  invasion  was  a  mere  ruse  to  enable 
him  to  marshal  his  forces  for  the  campaign  which  came  to  a 
climax  at  Austerlitz.  But  there  is  evidence  enough  that  be- 
neath his  nonsense  about  rowing  or  dodging  into  England 
he  concealed  an  elaborate  plan  for  assembling  a  great  naval 
fleet  that  should  swoop  down  upon  the  British  men-of-war 
and  sweep  a  passage  for  his  army. 

' '  Leave  it  to  me, ' '  he  said  as  he  kept  his  secret  locked  in  his 
breast.  ' '  I  will  surprise  the  world  by  the  grandeur  and  rapid- 
ity of  my  strokes."  To  distract  the  British  blockaders  of  his 
harbours  and  give  his  imprisoned  naval  fleets  an  opportunity 
to  escape,  he  darkened  the  air  with  the  cloud  of  a  gigantic 
deception.  Throwing  up  fortifications  on  the  southern  shore 
of  Italy  and  marching  thousands  of  soldiers  down  the  penin- 
sula, he  lured  Nelson  away  from  Toulon,  out  of  which  the 
French  fleet  stole  and  sailed  unopposed  through  the  Straits 
of  Gibraltar.  Assembling  an  army  of  20,000  in  the  west  of 
France,  with  a  noisy  pretence  that  it  was  destined  for  Ireland, 
he  hoped  thus  to  distract  the  British  blockading  ships  off 
Brest,  enable  his  own  vessels  to  slip  out  of  that  harbour  and, 
joining  the  Toulon  fleet,  suddenly  fall  upon  the  Channel 
squadron  of  the  British. 

"The  English  know  not  what  awaits  them,"  he  remarked 
enigmatically  to  his  suite  when  he  heard  of  the  escape  of  his 
Toulon  battleships.  "If  we  have  the  power  of  crossing  for 
but  twelve  hours  England  will  be  no  more."  But  as  he 
waited  in  vain  for  his  ships  to  come,  he  asked  for  even  less 
time  and  pleaded  with  fate,  "Let  us  be  masters  of  the  Channel 
for  six  hours  and  we  shall  be  masters  of  the  world," 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEA  183 

Still  his  prudent  commander  at  Brest  held  back.  ''Start, 
start  at  once!"  he  commanded  and  implored  him.  "In  your 
hands  are  the  destinies  of  the  world. ' '  But  his  fleets  did  not 
appear  on  the  bare  western  horizon.  On  the  contrary,  his 
Toulon  ships  had  already  run  into  Cadiz  and  the  British 
watchdogs  never  took  their  eyes  off  the  rest  of  his  vessels. 

With  gloom  and  anger  clouding  his  brow.  Napoleon  paced 
the  sandy  bounds  of  the  unconquered  sea  and  bitterly  mut- 
tered to  himself  in  his  impotent  rage,  "The  English  will  be- 
come very  small  when  France  shall  have  two  or  three  admirals 
willing  to  die."  But  Mars  had  failed  to  snatch  the  trident 
from  Neptune.  The  master  of  the  land  had  been  thwarted  by 
the  mistress  of  the  sea. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

THE  FALL  OF  VIENNA 

1805     AGE  36 

WHEN  Napoleon  raised  his  camp  at  Boulogne  at  the 
end  of  the  summer  of  1805,  he  turned  his  back  upon 
England  in  a  retreat  from  her  invincible  strong- 
hold, the  sea,  but  only  to  strike  her  down,  if  he  could,  amid 
the  hills  of  Germany.  He  marched  away  to  conquer  the  coast 
of  Europe  and,  sealing  every  harbour  against  British  trade, 
leave  England  marooned  in  her  fog. 

Thenceforth  he  battled  to  that  end  alone,  whether  in  Aus- 
tria or  in  Germany  or  in  Spain  or  in  Russia.  All  the  Na- 
poleonic wars  had  no  other  object  than  this.  They  were  not 
for  the  conquest  of  lands,  but  of  harbours.  England  had 
closed  the  sea  to  France  and  France  would  close  the  continent 
to  her.  "To  live  without  commerce,  without  fleets,  without 
colonies  and  subject  to  the  unjust  will  of  an  enemy,"  Na- 
poleon said  in  his  proclamation  at  the  opening  of  the  war,  "is 
not  to  live  like  Frenchmen." 

He  made  war  to  win  for  France  dominions  beyond  the  sea, 
while  England  made  war  to  protect  the  foundations  she  was 
only  then  laying  of  that  world-wide  British  Empire  which 
finally  was  won  at  Waterloo.  The  destiny  of  Asia,  Africa, 
and  Australia,  and,  perhaps,  the  Americas  was  determined  on 
the  battlefields  of  Europe. 

The  allies  of  France  and  England  changed  sides  from  cam- 
paign to  campaign,  but  the  two  principals  in  the  long  and 
bloody  duel  remained  the  same.  They  are  the  rival  powers, 
always  contending  for  the  mastery  of  the  world,  England  with 
her  ships  and  her  wealth,  France  with  the  sword  of  Napoleon, 
which  was  no  more  than  a  weapon  borrowed  for  this  earth- 

184 


THE  FALL  OF  VIENNA  185 

shaking  struggle  between  conflicting  national  impulses  that 
swept  over  Europe  like  wrestling  tides. 

It  was  an  irrepressible  conflict.  Many  historians,  transpos- 
ing cause  and  effect,  represent  it  as  a  war  for  the  advancement 
of  one  man's  personal  ambition.  But  it  began  while  Napoleon 
was  yet  idling  in  Corsica.  It  would  have  gone  on  to  the  end 
had  he  never  stepped  foot  on  the  shores  of  France.  Had  the 
French  found  a  leader  less  resourceful,  doubtless  the  final  de- 
cision would  have  been  more  quickly  rendered.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  result  might  not  have  been  so  decisive  and 
lasting. 

It  is  a  libel  on  mankind  to  say  that  all  the  nations  which 
Napoleon  led  to  the  slaughter,  year  after  year  for  ten  years, 
followed  him  merely  to  flatter  his  self-conceit  and  poured  out 
their  blood  only  to  feed  his  appetite  for  power.  He  was  but 
the  agent  of  a  mighty  force  that  swept  kings  and  peoples  on 
its  irresistible  current.  The  glory  of  the  Alexanders,  the 
Ca?sars,  and  the  Napoleons  is  no  more  than  the  foam  on  the 
breakers  of  the  great  movements  of  men.  But  by  watching 
them  we  may  best  mark  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  surging  waves 
of  human  history. 

The  chief  monarchies  of  Europe  leagued  themselves  for  the 
overthrow  of  the  French  Republic  in  1792  and  again  in  1799. 
A  third  coalition  was  formed,  in  1805,  to  take  from  the  Em- 
pire the  conquests  it  had  inherited  from  the  Republic.  Of  all 
those  coalitions  England  was  the  soul  and  the  purse.  The 
French  could  not  fight  her  on  the  seas,  but  she  could  fight 
them  on  the  land,  not  always  with  English  soldiers,  perhaps, 
but  with  her  pounds,  shillings  and  pence,  and  with  the  dogged 
persistence  of  her  national  character. 

The  ruling  passion  of  Austria  and  her  Emperor,  Francis  I, 
was  to  recover  in  Italy  and  Germany  the  rich  provinces  they 
had  lost  in  two  disastrous  w^ars  with  France.  Russia  was  im- 
pelled by  a  national  ambition  to  make  herself  the  foremost 
power  in  Europe  and  by  the  vanity  of  her  youthful  Czar, 
Alexander  I,  to  make  himself  the  arbiter  of  the  nations. 
Meanwhile  Prussia  timidly  held  back  and  disappointed  the 
Allies. 


186  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  alliance  was  completed  and  the  campaign  outlined  early 
in  August.  The  Allies  adopted,  however,  the  old  familiar 
plan  of  Napoleon's  enemies,  conceived  in  their  overweening 
desire  to  make  war  without  taking  the  chances  of  war. 
Their  unchanging  idea  was  to  play  the  game  safe  and 
make  success  certain.  They  never  ventured  to  hurl  them- 
selves upon  Napoleon  in  full  force  and  stake  everything 
on  one  campaign  for  his  complete  overthrow.  He  used 
therefore  regularly  to  lay  down  for  the  information  of  his 
generals  this  proposition :  ' '  The  enemy,  in  the  Austrian  man- 
ner, will  make  three  attacks.  Ignore  two  of  them,  and  throw 
yourselves  with  all  your  forces  on  the  third. ' ' 

Now  the  Allies,  under  Austrian  influence,  were  still  further 
dividing  their  strength  to  make  several  attacks  upon  him,  first 
on  the  banks  of  the  Danube  in  Germany ;  second,  in  Hanover ; 
third,  in  northern  Italy,  and  fourth,  in  southern  Italy. 
JMoreover  they  sought  to  strike  him  while  his  back  was  turned 
and  he  was  pacing  the  shore  at  Boulogne,  still  absorbed  in  his 
project  for  invading  England. 

An  Austrian  army,  therefore,  stealthily  moved  up  the 
Danube  at  the  end  of  August,  and  a  Russian  army  promised 
to  hasten  forward  in  time  to  join  it  by  October  20 ;  but  the 
Austrians  failed  to  take  account  of  the  interesting  fact  that 
the  Russian  calendar  is  twelve  days  behind  theirs.  An  even 
more  serious  miscalculation  was  made  by  the  wise  men  of 
Vienna.  They  reckoned  that  Napoleon  would  not  wake  up 
from  his  dream  of  capturing  England  until  it  was  so  late  that 
he  could  not  possibly  hurry  an  army  to  meet  the  allied  forces 
by  the  Danube  before  November  10. 

AVatching  him  closely,  while  their  army  silently  crept 
toward  his  frontier,  they  flattered  themselves  that  he  remained 
oblivious  to  his  peril.  They  were  delighted  to  see  him 
dawdling  away  his  days  at  Boulogne  or  at  St.  Cloud  in  seem- 
ing idleness;  but  he  was  whispering,  however,  that  it  was  a 
time  to  appear  pusillanimous. 

The  Paris  papers  contained  no  mention  of  the  impending 
war  or  of  the  movement  of  hostile  forces  toward  France.  Nor 
were  they  permitted  to  hint  that  the  Emperor  had  lifted  his 


THE  FALL  OF  VIENNA  187 

camp  at  Boulo^e,  had  headed  200,000  Frenchmen  toward  the 
Rhine,  had  ordered  Bernadotte  to  march  the  French  army  of 
occupation  out  of  Hanover  for  the  purpose  of  joining  the 
Grand  Army  and  had  directed  two  minor  armies  in  Italy  to 
parry  the  attacks  aimed  at  him  there. 

When  in  due  time  his  armies  were  at  the  Rhine,  he  sud- 
denly cut  off  the  outer  world  from  France  so  that  not  a  hint 
of  military  movements  should  escape  to  the  enemy.  No  for- 
eign mails  were  permitted  to  leave  the  country.  Even  the 
despatches  of  the  ambassadors  at  Paris  were  held  up,  and  not 
a  horse  was  allowed  to  go  across  the  frontier  unless  he  carried 
an  army  courier,  France  became  in  a  day  a  land  of  im- 
penetrable silence,  under  cover  of  which  her  army  crossed  the 
Rhine  late  in  September. 

The  army  which  sped  over  the  Rhine  had  undergone  many 
changes  in  the  more  than  two  years  since  Napoleon  first  mar- 
shalled it  on  the  sandy  heights  of  Boulogne.  It  had  been 
trained  by  master  hands  in  a  great  school  of  war,  from  which 
it  went  forth  the  best  drilled,  the  most  magnificent  military 
body  the  world  had  ever  seen.  Its  brilliant  accoutrements 
were  unstained  by  service  in  the  field,  and  its  soldiers  in  their 
queues,  many  of  them  wearing  ear-rings,  were  as  fresh  and 
spirited  as  colts  dashing  out  of  a  pasture. 

Yet  they  were  not  strangers  to  battle.  For  although  no 
foe  had  ventured  in  five  years  to  meet  triumphant  France  in 
combat,  a  full  half  of  those  200,000  were  battle  veterans,  and 
a  fourth  of  them  had  fought  through  all  the  victorious  wars 
of  the  Republic  for  ten  years. 

The  very  name  of  the  organisation  was  changed.  It  ceased 
to  be  the  Army  of  England  when  it  turned  its  face  from  the 
sea  toward  Germany  and  became  the  Grand  Army,  bearing 
aloft  on  its  standards  for  the  first  time  the  imperial  eagles, 
which  it  was  thenceforth  to  follow  from  Boulogne  to  Water- 
loo, but  which,  after  all,  is  only  an  easy  march  of  125  miles ! 

Moreover,  while  it  tarried  by  the  shore  of  the  English  Chan- 
nel, the  army  had  experienced  a  deeper  change,  a  change  of 
allegiance.  It  had  lost  its  soul,  and  a  new  spirit  had  stolen 
through  the  ranks  of  those  one  time  republican  warriors. 


188  IN  TPIE  FOOTSTEPS  OF.  NAPOLEON 

They  had  come  together  in  the  name  of  the  French  people, 
but  they  marched  to  war  now  in  the  name  of  one  man.  An 
idol  had  displaced  an  ideal  in  their  devotion  and  they  felt 
no  more  the  old  stirrings  of  patriotism  in  their  blood. 

Never  again  w^ere  they  to  fight  for  their  country  and  for 
themselves,  but  ever  after  for  their  Emperor  and  his  Empire. 
They  marched  and  battled  no  longer  to  carry  liberty  to  others, 
but  to  win  glory  for  themselves,  for  had  not  every  man  of 
them  been  promised  a  marshal's  baton  in  his  knapsack? 
"Where  a  generous  if  fanatical  passion  for  freedom  had  glowed 
in  their  breasts,  personal  ambition  now  ruled. 

True,  they  still  bore  in  a  silver  case  the  heart  of  La  Tour 
d'Auvergne,  that  Bayard  of  the  Revolution,  that  spartan  sol- 
dier of  the  Eepublic,  who  despised  rank,  scorned  promotion 
and  accepted  no  other  reward  for  his  valour  than  the  simple 
title  of  the  first  grenadier  of  France.  On  their  rolls  they  still 
carried  his  name  as  a  synonym  of  modest,  unselfish  love  of 
country.  At  every  roll-call  of  the  46th  demi-brigade  there 
still  rang  out  the  name  of  La  Tour  d'Auvergne  and  the 
solemn  response  of  the  oldest  grenadier:  "Dead  on  the  field 
of  honour." 

As  the  Grand  Army  marched  by  his  grave  in  Bavaria — 
another  French  Republic  has  since  given  his  bones  sepulture 
in  the  Invalides  at  Paris — it  was  with  ranks  closed,  drums 
beating  and  swords  lifted.  Yet,  for  all  that  now  meaning- 
less ritual,  the  spirit  of  La  Tour  d'Auvergne  was  as  dead 
among  the  soldiers  who  pressed  after  the  eagles  of  Napoleon  as 
the  France  for  which  he  had  given  his  life. 

Napoleon's  bulletins  themselves  reflected  the  change  that 
had  come  over  France  and  the  army.  The  conquering  watch- 
words of  his  Italian  campaign,  "Liberty,  Fraternity,  Equal- 
ity," were  discarded.  It  was  enough  for  him  to  say  to  his 
army  now,  "Soldiers,  your  Emperor  is  in  the  midst  of  you," 
and  to  bid  the  nation,  "let  100,000  more  Frenchmen  come 
and  range  themselves  under  my  flags." 

"My  soldiers  are  my  children,"  the  one-time  sons  of  the 
Revolution  were  flattered  to  be  told  by  the  Emperor.  Yet 
they  looked  upon  him  more  as  a  comrade  than  as  a  father. 


THE  FALL  OF  VIENNA  189 

He  was  still  their  "Little  Corporal"  in  the  same  simple  uni- 
form and  three-cornered  black  hat  that  he  wore  when  only  a 
general  of  the  Republic. 

None  of  the  old  moustaches,  a  high  officer  tells  us,  would 
have  dared  to  speak  to  the  lowest  sublieutenant  with  the  free- 
dom they  showed  to  Napoleon  himself  as  he  went  his  nightly 
round  of  the  bivouac,  stopping  to  talk  with  the  men  by  their 
camp  fires,  asking  them  what  they  were  cooking  in  their  steam- 
ing pots  and  smiling  with  amusement  at  jesting  familiarities 
which  he  would  not  have  tolerated  among  his  marshals.  Those 
dignitaries  were  not  permitted  to  take  the  slightest  liberties, 
and  were  required  to  show  themselves  duly  humble  in  the 
imperial  presence.  They  had  their  reward,  for  Napoleon's 
obligations  to  them  were  amply  repaid  with  money  and  rank. 

But  to  the  poor  multitude  who  were  fighting  his  battles  for 
five  sous  a  day  he  presented  himself  as  a  kindly  friend  and 
powerful  champion.  He  would  listen  to  the  complaint  of  any 
private  in  the  ranks  against  his  superiors,  and  he  abolished 
flogging  in  his  earliest  campaigns,  although  until  then  Europe 
never  had  seen  an  army  move  except  under  the  lash. 

He  did  not  pretend  to  feed  his  soldiers,  however,  for  he  re- 
fused to  encumber  himself  with  magazines  of  supplies  or 
burden  the  French  taxpayers  with  the  cost  of  maintaining 
the  army.  The  men  were  turned  loose  on  the  people  of  the 
war-stricken  lands,  to  forage  for  themselves.  They  ravaged 
the  shops,  the  cottages,  the  gardens,  and  dug  up  with  their 
bayonets  the  little  potato  patches  of  the  peasantry. 

Although  they  were  moving  through  friendly  countries  and 
not  in  the  land  of  the  enemy,  no  attention  was  paid  to  the 
infuriated  outcries  of  the  devastated  inhabitants.  Napoleon 
calmly  assured  his  generals  that  the  people  really  did  not  care 
if  they  were  robbed,  and  it  was  a  saying  among  the  soldiers 
that  "a  man  is  like  a  sheaf  of  wheat;  the  more  you  beat  him 
the  more  he  yields."  Accordingly,  the  peasants  were  mauled 
until  they  gave  up  their  last  copper. 

As  the  French  marched  through  Germany  in  the  rain  and 
sleet  and  mud  of  a  cold  October,  they  stripped  the  ^^llages  as 
they  went,  leaving  them  bare  for  the  rear  columns.     Some- 


190     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

times  the  hindmost  floundered  through  the  muddy  roads  for 
days  without  coming  upon  a  pig,  chicken  or  even  a  loaf  of 
bread.  But  it  was  part  of  Napoleon's  military  calculations 
that  as  long  as  their  legs  lasted,  hungry  soldiers  marched 
fastest,  spurred  on,  as  they  were,  by  their  eagerness  to  find 
something  to  eat. 

The  army,  having  crossed  the  Rhine  at  five  different  points, 
descended  upon  the  unsuspecting  enemy  like  the  five  out- 
spread members  of  a  monstrous  hand  prepared  to  grasp  its 
prey.  Napoleon  had  brought  his  forces  into  the  theatre  of 
war  full  seven  weeks  before  his  enemies  had  supposed  it  pos- 
sible for  hira  to  confront  them. 

Meanwhile  General  ]\Iack,  the  Austrian  commander,  was  sit- 
ting down  by  the  Danube  within  the  fortifications  of  the  old 
town  of  Ulm,  on  the  borders  of  Bavaria  and  Wiirtemberg, 
quietly  and  confidently  awaiting  the  arrival  of  his  Russian 
Allies.  Once  the  allied  armies  had  come  together,  they 
planned  to  go  forth  to  meet  the  belated  French  in  the  Black 
Forest.  For,  of  course.  Napoleon  would  come  through  the 
forest.     French  armies  always  had  come  that  way. 

Looking  straight  ahead,  certain  that  Napoleon  was  intend- 
ing to  attack  him  squarely  in  front,  Mack  had  no  eyes  for 
Ney,  Lannes,  Soult,  Davout,  and  Marmont,  on  his  right,  as 
their  columns  were  bending  toward  him  from  the  north. 
When  their  presence  did  dawn  upon  his  understanding  at  last, 
he  thought  they  must  be  engaged  in  some  other  campaign, 
perhaps  against  Bohemia!  Soon  he  turned  to  find  that  the 
foe,  instead  of  being  before  him,  had  got  in  behind  him.  For 
120,000  French,  having  crossed  the  Danube  without  encoun- 
tering resistance,  were  barring  both  the  Russian  line  of  ad- 
vance and  the  Austrian  line  of  retreat  to  Vienna.  Prisoners 
were  gathered  in  by  the  thousands,  often  without  having  an 
opportunity  to  offer  the  least  defence. 

Ulm  quickly  became  a  cage,  with  from  25,000  to  27,000 
white  coats  and  800  guns  caught  in  it.  The  leaden  skies  which 
had  lowered  upon  the  beleaguered  town,  burst  into  a  mocking 
smile  at  its  fall  and  a  brilliant  sun  beamed  upon  the  con- 
queror as  he  stood  on  the  hillside  at  the  northern  gate  in  the 


THE  FALL  OF  VIENNA  191 

midst  of  his  dazzling  staff  to  receive  the  surrender  of  the 
stronghold.  While  the  captive  army  silently  marched  out  to 
fling  its  arms  at  the  feet  of  Napoleon,  the  victorious  French 
filled  the  valley  of  the  Danube  with  their  gloating  cry,  ' '  Vive 
I'Empereur !" 

The  campaign  of  Ulm  was  at  an  end.  An  Austrian  army 
of  perhaps  eighty  thousand  men  had  been  smashed  in  three 
weeks,  and  altogether  above  fifty  thousand  prisoners  had  been 
taken.  The  world  stood  astounded  by  the  rapidity  and  com- 
pleteness of  Napoleon's  success,  which  he  seemed  to  have  won 
by  wizardry. 

As  the  new  Emperor  drained  the  cup  of  victory,  however, 
he  found  a  bitter  draught  mingled  with  its  sweetness.  For 
the  day  after  the  fall  of  Ulm,  the  Battle  of  Trafalgar  was 
fought  off  the  coast  of  Spain.  Nelson,  dying  victorious  in  the 
cockpit  of  his  flagship,  had  won  for  England  a  supremacy 
on  the  sea  which  left  her  absolutely  unchallenged  in  European 
waters  for  109  years  when,  in  1914,  another  Emperor  threw 
down  the  gauge. 

Swallowing  the  bitter  draught  of  Trafalgar,  Napoleon,  with 
redoubled  determination,  turned  anew  to  conquer  England  on 
the  land.  As  he  marched  on  Vienna  at  full  speed,  the  Aus- 
trian imperial  family  and  aristocracy  took  flight.  The  Em- 
peror Francis'  fourteen-year-old  daughter,  the  Archduchess 
Marie  Louise,  found  herself  once  more,  as  eight  years  before, 
driven  by  Napoleon  from  her  palace  home.  The  girlish  wan- 
derer among  the  castles  of  Hungary  and  Galicia  wrote  a 
friend  from  one  of  her  refuges:  "God  must  be  very  wroth 
with  us.  Our  family  is  all  scattered;  my  dear  parents  are  at 
Olmutz;  we  are  at  Kaschan ;  there  is  a  third  colony  at  Of  en." 
But  she  strove  to  keep  up  her  courage  with  the  philosophic 
assurance  that  "the  time  must  come  when  the  usurper  will 
lose  heart.  Perhaps  God  has  let  him  go  so  far  to  make  his 
ruin  more  complete,  when  He  shall  have  abandoned  him." 

When  the  conqueror  appeared  in  front  of  the  walls  of 
Vienna,  in  November,  the  very  walls  which  120  years  before 
had  stood  like  a  dike  to  stop  a  flood  of  Turks  from  pouring 
over  Christendom,  the  gates  of  the  city  were  opened  to  him 


192     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

without  waiting  for  him  to  knock.  Without  firing  a  shot,  he 
had  become  the  master  of  a  city  with  a  population  of  100,000 
inside  the  walls  and  large  suburbs  lying  outside  its  forti- 
fications. For  the  first  time,  he  entered  the  conquered 
capital  of  a  sovereign  and  made  himself  at  home  in  the  palace 
of  a  fugitive  monarch,  Marie  Louise's  favourite  home,  the 
lovely  Schonbrunn. 

The  defenders  of  Vienna  had  vanished  before  him  only  to 
hasten  northward  and  unite  with  the  Eussians  among  the 
hills  of  Moravia,  where  the  Czar  Alexander  and  Emperor 
Francis  were  confidently  planning  to  crush  the  Corsican  up- 
start who  had  dared  to  assume  the  imperial  rank. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ 

1805      AGE  36 

SOME  great  battlefields  are  like  some  great  men;  the 
closer  you  come  to  them  the  smaller  they  appear. 
Austerlitz  and  the  sun  of  Austerlitz,  for  example,  are 
known  to  every  schoolboy  in  the  western  hemisphere.  They 
spell  success  the  world  round,  just  as  Waterloo  is  synonymous 
with  defeat.  Yet  the  nearer  Austerlitz  is  approached,  the 
more  obscure  it  becomes.  It  is  not  even  a  dot  on  the  official 
railway  map  of  Austria. 

At  Brunn,  in  whose  Austrian  castle  Silvio  Pellico,  the  Italian 
patriot-prisoner,  wrote  his  sad  and  moving  tale,  ' '  My  Prisons, 
and  where  Napoleon's  army  made  its  headquarters  in  the  open- 
ing winter  of  1805,  the  guide  books  and  the  hotel  people,  with 
all  their  volubility  about  the  surrounding  attractions  and 
neighbouring  excursions,  are  reticent  concerning  Austerlitz, 
fifteen  miles  away.  Even  the  3500  inhabitants  of  the  village 
of  Austerlitz  itself  have  to  think  twice  before  they  can  call  to 
mind  the  name  by  which  their  little  town  is  celebrated  on  the 
pages  of  history.  For  they  are  mostly  Moravians  who  speak 
the  Czechish  tongue,  and  they  call  their  place  Slavkova.  Thus 
the  shining  name  of  Austerlitz,  which  is  dimmer  at  Vienna 
than  it  is  at  San  Francisco,  vanishes  quite  at  the  gates  of  the 
town. 

Not  only  is  Austerlitz  not  Austerlitz,  but  there  never  was  a 
battle  of  Austerlitz.  Not  a  volley  was  fired  within  the  limits 
of  the  town.  Two  Emperors  rode  out  of  the  village  one  De- 
cember morning  to  wrestle  with  a  third  Emperor  in  front  of 
Austerlitz.     But  they  did  not  fight  in  the  town  or  for  the 

193 


194     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

town.  It  better  suited  Napoleon,  however,  to  emphasise  his 
victory  by  naming  the  battle  for  the  village  in  which  the  two 
defeated  Emperors  had  made  their  headquarters  and  to  write 
his  bulletin  in  the  very  room  from  which  he  drove  them  forth 
in  the  snow  of  a  winter 's  night. 

Napoleon  not  only  named  the  battle  to  please  his  fancy,  but 
he  also  chose  the  battle  ground  and  even  the  battle  day.  Ar- 
rived at  Brunn,  the  Moravian  capital  which  lies  at  the  foot  of 
a  castled  hill  ninety  miles  north  of  Vienna,  the  heir  of  the 
Kevolution  loudly  clamoured  for  peace  in  his  appeals  to  "my 
brother,"  the  heir  of  Charles  V,  and  "my  brother,"  the  heir 
of  Peter  the  Great,  who  were  at  the  camp  of  the  allied  army 
at  Olmutz,  some  fifty  miles  north  and  near  the  Russian  fron- 
tier. His  eager  entreaties,  as  he  shrewdly  intended,  were  mis- 
taken for  a  craven  confession  of  weakness  and  fear.  And 
they  only  served  to  embolden  the  imperial  Allies  to  give  him 
battle,  then  and  there,  the  very  thing  he  was  seeking. 

When  he  saw  the  welcome  signs  that  his  two  "brothers," 
Alexander  and  Francis,  were  sufficiently  flattered  in  their 
conceit  that  they  had  caught  him  in  a  desperate  plight  and 
saw  them  preparing  to  smite  him,  he  galloped  out  on  the  road 
to  Olmutz  for  the  purpose  of  getting  the  lay  of  the  land  be- 
tween him  and  the  enemy.  Pausing  at  a  point  a  dozen  miles 
to  the  east  of  Brunn,  he  studied  the  scene  in  silence. 

In  his  strategic  imagination  Napoleon  was  fighting  then  the 
battle  of  Austerlitz,  for  the  field  of  that  great  combat  was 
spread  before  him.  On  the  eastern  horizon  he  saw  the  Little 
Carpathian  Mountains  rising  to  form  the  Hungarian  frontier 
forty  miles  away;  but  his  practised  eye  lingered  on  the  roll- 
ing plains  and  gentle  hills,  little  dales  and  brooks,  ponds  and 
marshes  lying  in  front  of  the  village  of  Austerlitz. 

The  Allies  would  come  down  the  road  from  Olmutz,  he 
argued,  while  his  own  outposts  fell  back  before  their  advance 
and  steadily  drew  them  on  to  the  battle  ground,  where  his 
forces  would  be  more  than  half  concealed  as  they  crouched 
behind  a  range  of  hills  west  of  Austerlitz.  Naturally  and 
properly  the  Allies  would  aim  to  get  around  him  on  the  right 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ  195 

or  south,  in  their  effort  to  cut  his  lines  to  Vienna  and  to 
Brunn  and  place  themselves  between  him  and  those  cities. 

Napoleon,  however,  relied  on  their  attempting,  after  the 
fashion  of  his  foes,  to  do  the  right  thing  in  the  wrong  way. 
He  knew  they  would  flinch  from  staking  everything  on  a  single 
move  and  would  not  have  the  courage  to  throw  themselves 
upon  his  right  wing  in  a  solid  body.  In  their  anxiety  to  make 
success  certain,  they  would  make  it  impossible  by  sending  only 
a  part  of  their  army  against  his  right,  while  they  sent  another 
part  against  his  left. 

Moreover,  he  took  note  of  the  fact  that  their  principal  move- 
ment would  have  to  be  made  across  a  brook  and  between  a 
high  hill  and  some  ponds,  natural  conditions  that  would  aid 
him  to  retard  and  embarrass  them.  And  while  they  were 
striking  at  his  two  wings,  he  would  hold  the  main  body  of  his 
forces  in  his  hand,  ready  to  hurl  it  like  a  thunderbolt  at  their 
centre  and  thus  break  their  army  in  two.  It  would  be  the 
old  story  repeated  so  often  on  the  fields  of  Napoleon's  vic- 
tories. His  foes  would  divide  to  attack  him  while  he  united 
to  attack  them. 

After  he  had  finished  fighting  the  battle  in  his  fancy,  as  he 
sat  in  his  saddle  on  the  high  road,  he  turned  to  his  waiting 
and  watching  staff.  "Make  a  careful  note  of  all  these 
heights,"  he  commanded.  "It  is  here  you  will  fight  before 
two  months  are  over."  His  only  mistake  was  that  the  enemy 
did  not  wait  two  months  but  only  two  weeks  to  meet  him  on 
the  ground  he  had  chosen. 

The  chief  military  commanders  of  the  allied  armies  pru- 
dently counselled  the  adoption  of  a  waiting  policy  and  de- 
fensive measures  until,  by  making  a  wide  detour,  the  other 
Austrian  army  in  the  south  had  come  to  join  them.  But 
Emperor  Francis  was  impatient  to  recover  his  lost  capital  and 
dominions,  and  the  twenty-eight-year-old  Czar  was  burning 
with  eagerness  to  see  a  battle,  as  also  were  the  young  nobles 
who  surrounded  him.  Many  were  certain  that  Napoleon  had 
with  him  no  more  than  40,000  men. 

The  monarchs,  therefore,  taking  matters  in  their  own  un- 


196  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

trained  hands,  determined  to  move  at  once.  Soon  the  Allies 
came  upon  French  outposts  along  the  Brunn  road,  but  these 
fled  before  them  and  left  the  way  open  to  Austerlitz,  where 
the  two  Emperors  found  a  pleasant  chateau  for  their  head- 
quarters. 

Napoleon  had  been  riding  over  the  field  all  day  and  watch- 
ing the  position  of  the  Allies.  From  the  hills  behind  which 
he  had  posted  most  of  his  75,000  men  he  looked  across  a  plain 
to  the  encampment  of  the  enemy  two  miles  in  front  of  Aus- 
terlitz on  the  banks  of  a  little  river  that  flows  to  the  west  of 
the  town. 

Out  of  the  plain  between  the  two  armies  rose  the  big,  steep 
hill  of  Pratzen,  which  any  general  in  Europe,  except  Na- 
poleon, would  have  seized  upon  as  an  admirable  position  to 
defend.  But  he  had  come  to  Moravia  to  destroy  an  army,  not 
to  hold  a  hill. 

He  left  the  hill,  therefore,  without  a  man  on  it  in  order 
that  the  Allies  might  not  be  diverted  from  their  nicely  laid 
plans.  He  could  have  delivered  "only  an  ordinary  battle," 
from  the  heights  of  Pratzen,  he  informed  those  marshals  who 
were  surprised  to  see  him  neglect  the  tempting  opportunity 
the  hill  offered  him  for  the  posting  of  troops  and  artillery, 
and  an  ''ordinary  battle"  would  necessarily  have  meant  an- 
other battle  afterward. 

To  Napoleon  a  war  was  not  a  series  of  sparring  matches. 
On  the  contrary,  he  went  into  every  battle  with  the  purpose 
of  fighting  to  a  finish,  and  he  meant  now  to  end  the  war  with 
one  staggering  blow  over  the  heart  of  his  foe.  "Whatever 
they  may  say,  believe  me,"  so  ran  a  maxim  to  which  he  re- 
mained faithful,  "a  man  fights  with  cannon  as  with  his  fists." 

Even  while  he  gazed  at  the  plain  the  day  before  the  battle, 
he  saw  the  left  wing  of  the  allied  army  pushing  all  the  time 
toward  the  southerly  foot  of  the  hill,  and  he  remarked  in  a 
tone  of  quiet  rejoicing:  "Before  to-morrow  night  that  army 
will  be  mine."  It  was  beginning  the  operation  which  would 
expose  its  heart  to  his  blow. 

So  clearly  did  he  foresee  the  character  of  the  battle,  he  took 
his  entire  army  into  his  confidence  and  in  his  proclamation, 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ  197 

which  was  read  at  the  head  of  every  battalion,  he  made  this 
extraordinary  announcement:  "We  occupy  a  formidable 
position,  and  while  the  Russians  and  Austrians  are  marching 
to  turn  my  right  wing,  their  flank  will  lie  open  to  us. ' ' 

That  comradic  frankness  was  followed  in  the  proclamation 
by  a  remarkable  pledge.  Most  commanders,  when  seeking  to 
inspire  their  men,  promise  to  share  their  perils.  Napoleon 
adopted  the  opposite  course  and  appealed  to  his  soldiers  to 
be  his  shield,  his  protectors  from  danger.  This  unique  bulletin 
is  documentary  evidence  of  the  affection  and  loyalty  in  which 
the  Grand  Army  held  its  commander-in-chief :  ' '  Soldiers,  I, 
myself,  will  direct  all  your  battalions.  If  with  your  accus- 
tomed bravery  you  carry  disorder  and  confusion  into  the 
enemy's  ranks  I  shall  hold  myself  distant  from  the  fire.  But 
should  victory  for  a  moment  seem  doubtful,  you  shall  see  your 
Emperor  expose  himself  to  the  foremost  strokes." 

A  very  dark  night  fell  upon  the  field.  Through  the  hazy 
mist.  Napoleon  saw  the  enemy's  lights  gleaming  dimly;  but 
he  had  the  French  fires  put  out  in  order  that  his  position  might 
not  be  disclosed.  His  bivouac  had  been  set  up  on  a  hill  not 
far  from  the  high  road,  between  Brunn  and  Austerlitz  and 
five  miles  from  the  headquarters  of  the  Allies.  That  imperial 
habitation  was  only  a  miserable  hut  made  of  straw  and  the 
limbs  of  trees,  with  a  hole  in  the  roof  to  let  the  smoke  ascend: 
from  the  fire — it  was  a  cold  first  of  December. 

After  a  brief  sleep  in  the  evening,  the  Emperor  rose  to  take 
one  more  view  of  his  own  lines  and  those  of  his  foe.  As  he 
walked  past  his  silent  army,  one  of  his  escorts  lighted  his  way 
with  a  torch.  The  sentries  seeing  his  face  in  the  flickering 
glare  raised  a  cry  of  "Vive  I'Empereur."  The  shout  ran 
through  the  camp  and  roused  the  sleeping  soldiers  from  their 
dreams  of  la  Belle  France.  As  they  straggled  to  their  feet 
and  shook  themselves  awake,  they  pulled  the  straw  from  their 
beds  on  the  frozen  ground  and  lighting  it,  tens  of  thousands 
of  torches  soon  were  flaring  in  the  inky  blackness  of  the  night, 
while  the  thunderous  cheers  of  the  Grand  Army  rolled  among 
the  hills. 

The  sudden  burst  of  shouting  roused  the  Russians  and  Aus- 


198  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

trians  and  some  of  their  chiefs  were  alarmed  anew  lest  the 
demonstration  were  a  ruse  to  cover  the  retreat  of  the  French. 
But  the  Grand  Army  really  was  celebrating  Napoleon 's  corona- 
tion. Some  one  had  passed  the  word  that  it  was  the  night  be- 
fore the  anniversary  of  that  event.  The  Empire  was  one  year 
old  and  its  defenders,  while  they  pranced  about  the  Emperor, 
joined  in  a  joyous  celebration  of  its  first  birthday. 

In  their  jubilation,  they  forgot  their  hunger,  for  nothing 
but  bread  had  been  issued  in  forty-eight  hours,  one  huge  loaf 
for  every  eight  men.  Napoleon,  seeing  potatoes  roasting  in  a 
fire,  stooped  over  and  picked  one  of  them  out.  As  he  ate  it  he 
asked  a  grenadier  between  bites,  "How  do  you  like  these 
pigeons  ? "  "  Humph, ' '  the  man  replied,  ' '  they  are  better  than 
nothing,  but  too  much  like  Lenten  food."  "Well,  old  man," 
the  Emperor  promised,  "help  me  to  dislodge  those  rascals  over 
there  and  we  will  have  a  Mardi  Gras  at  Vienna." 

A  grenadier  came  up  and  said,  "Sire,  thou  hast  no  need  to 
expose  thyself.  I  promise  thee  in  the  name  of  the  grenadiers 
that  thou  shalt  have  to  fight  but  with  thine  eyes  and  that  we 
will  bring  thee  to-morrow  the  flags  and  the  guns  of  the  Rus- 
sians to  celebrate  the  anniversary  of  thy  crowning." 

As  Napoleon  returned  to  his  hut  on  the  hill,  he  exclaimed, 
* '  This  is  the  finest  night  of  my  life ! ' ' 

At  four  o'clock  the  Emperor  was  awake  again  and  calling 
for  a  drink  of  punch.  Constant  says  that  he  himself  would 
have  given  the  whole  Austrian  Empire  for  another  hour  of 
sleep,  but  he  rose  and  brewed  the  punch.  Then  he  dressed 
his  master,  putting  on  him  the  familiar  grey  overcoat. 

The  day  of  Austerlitz  had  broken  cold  and  gloomy,  with  the 
two  armies  lost  in  a  thick  fog.  The  Grand  Army  received  its 
rations  of  soup  and  brandy,  and  the  tumult  of  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  troops  of  three  empires,  with  their  horses  and  wagons 
and  artillery,  soon  filled  the  air  as,  without  seeing  where  they 
were  going,  they  blindly  moved  forward  over  the  frosted  white 
earth. 

When,  however,  the  marshals  had  gathered  behind  Napoleon, 
a  flush  spread  over  the  Carpathian  horizon.  Soon  the  sun — 
"the  sun  of  Austerlitz" — shone  upon  them   from  the  blue 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTEKLITZ  199 

sky.  As  the  Emperor  stood  on  the  brow  of  the  hill  in  advance 
of  his  suite  and  alone,  he  eagerly  watched  the  Russians  emerg- 
ing from  a  bank  of  fog  and  disappearing  in  another  as  they 
descended  into  a  deep  hollow  beyond  the  farther  slopes  of 
Pratzen.  They  were  so  near  him  that  without  lifting  his  field 
glass  he  could  distinguish  the  cavalry  from  the  infantry. 

His  forecast  of  the  battle  was  being  verified.  To  some  pass- 
ing regiments  he  exultantly  shouted  in  his  rich,  full  tones, 
which  sent  a  thrill  through  the  ranks:  ''Soldiers,  we  must 
finish  this  campaign  with  a  thunderclap  that  shall  confound  the 
pride  of  our  enemies ! ' '  The  response  was  a  lusty  roar  of 
"Vive  I'Empereur!"  as  the  men  lifted  their  hats  on  their 
bayonets. 

Just  then  two  men  riding  in  front  of  a  party  of  horsemen 
galloped  along  the  road  toward  the  village  of  Pratzen,  near 
the  foot  of  the  big  hill.  One  was  in  a  black  uniform  with  a 
white  plume  and  seated  on  a  chestnut  horse,  the  other  in 
a  white  uniform  on  a  black  horse.  They  were  the  allied 
Emperors  who  from  their  hill  of  observation  close  to  the 
town  of  Austerlitz  had  descended  upon  the  field  to  see  for 
themselves  the  cause  of  a  great  confusion  among  their  troops. 
The  presence  of  their  majesties  and  the  commands  they  gave 
stirred  a  tardy  movement  to  occupy  the  still  bare  heights  of 
Pratzen. 

As  Napoleon  saw  the  Russians  climbing  the  hill,  he  turned 
in  his  saddle  and,  breaking  a  long  silence,  quietly  inquired, 
"Marshal  Soult,  how  much  time  will  you  require  to  reach  the 
heights  of  Pratzen?"  "Less  than  twenty  minutes.  Sire," 
Soult  replied.  "My  troops  are  ready  at  the  bottom  of  the 
valley  and  covered  with  fog  and  the  bivouac  smoke  so  that  the 
enemy  cannot  see  them. ' ' 

After  a  moment's  calculation,  Napoleon  said,  "In  that  case, 
let  us  wait  a  quarter  of  an  hour  more."  The  longer  he  per- 
mitted the  Allies  to  go  on  with  the  movements  that  were  weak- 
ening their  centre,  the  more  he  would  profit  by  their  mistake. 
They  were  embarked  in  a  faulty  operation  and  it  was  not  for 
him  to  show  them  their  error  too  soon. 

Already  he  heard  the  echoes  of  heavy  musketry  firing  from 


200  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  direction  of  his  threatened  right  wing,  where  Marshal 
Davout  was  struggling  by  a  brook  to  check  the  advance  of 
30,000  Russians  and  Austrians.  Other  thousands  of  the  enemy 
had  been  detached  to  assail  the  French  left  along  the  Brunn 
road.  Meanwhile  the  line  of  the  allied  centre  grew  thinner 
and  thinner  and  gaps  had  begun  to  appear  in  it  here  and  there. 

It  was  not  far  from  nine  o'clock  when  Napoleon  decided  that 
the  time  had  come  when  he  must  let  the  Allies  see  their  mistake. 
He  had  drawn  off  the  glove  from  his  white,  feminine  right 
hand,  and  now  waving  it  toward  Pratzen,  he  gave  the  order  to 
storm  the  heights.  Soult's  fog-wrapped  battalions  burst  out 
of  the  valley  at  the  w^estern  foot  of  the  hill.  Racing  up  the 
steep  slope  in  overwhelming  numbers,  they  spread  panic  among 
its  Russian  defenders,  who  had  only  just  toiled  up  the  opposite 
side.  The  Czar's  green  lines  were  quickly  steadied  by  rein- 
forcements, but  Soult  had  twenty  more  battalions  at  his  heels, 
and  it  was  not  long  until  the  Russians  were  tumbled  down  the 
hill  in  a  demoralised  mob,  abandoning  their  cannon  where  they 
were  stalled  in  the  mud  of  the  thawing  earth. 

The  French  were  masters  of  the  heights  of  Pratzen,  the 
Gibraltar  of  the  field.  Napoleon  himself  now  moved  nearer 
the  disgarnished  centre  of  the  enemy,  and  as  he  passed  Soult 
he  leaned  over  and,  stretching  out  his  arm  to  embrace  him, 
exclaimed,  ''My  dear  Marshal,  you  are  the  best  tactician  in 
Europe ! ' ' 

The  firing  line  of  the  Allies  was  flung  out  seven  miles  in 
length  when,  not  far  from  noon,  Napoleon  began  to  make  a 
deadly  lunge  at  the  enemy 's  weakened  heart,  the  denuded  cen- 
tre. The  shock  of  the  onset  fell  upon  a  picturesque  little  vil- 
lage along  the  line  of  the  railroad  that  now  crosses  the  battle- 
field on  its  way  from  Brunn  toward  Hungary.  There  Prince 
Murat  and  Marshal  Bernadotte  faced  the  Grank  Duke  Con- 
stantine  of  Russia  and  there  the  flower  of  the  martial  youth 
of  three  empires  fought. 

The  imperial  guard  of  France,  the  noble  guard  of  Russia 
and  the  chevalier  guards  of  Austria  rolled  back  and  forth  over 
the  field  in  the  murderous  fury  of  a  hand-to-hand  combat,  a 
French  guardsman,  shrieking  as  he  savagely  ran  his  sabre 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ  201 

through  a  young  Russian  guardsman,  "'SVe  will  give  the  ladies 
of  St.  Petersburg  something  to  cry  for. ' ' 

After  horrible  sacrifices,  the  remnant  of  the  noble  and  the 
chevalier  guards  fled  before  the  Gallic  fury,  and  INIurat  raced 
up  to  the  very  gate  of  Austerlitz.  As  the  Grank  Duke  Con- 
stantine  took  flight  from  the  lost  field,  a  mameluke  pursued 
him  so  hotly  that  the  Grand  Duke  had  to  turn  to  beat  him  off. 
Only  when  a  shot  from  Constantine  had  felled  the  horse  of 
his  pursuer  could  he  make  good  his  escape. 

In  the  front  ranks  of  the  retreating  soldiers,  two  men,  one 
wearing  a  white  feather,  the  other  a  white  uniform,  spurred 
their  horses  over  a  ditch.  They  were  the  defeated  Emperors. 
The  Czar,  who  a  few  hours  before  was  rosy  with  youth  and 
confidence,  now  was  pale,  hollow  cheeked  and  sunken  eyed ; 
but  Francis,  who  had  been  beaten  so  often  by  Napoleon,  better 
concealed  his  agony. 

The  fatal  blow  had  been  delivered  and  had  left  an  ugly  gap 
three  miles  wide  between  the  right  and  the  left  wings  of  the 
Allies.  The  army  of  the  two  Emperors  was  hopelessly  cut  in 
two  and  the  right  wing  routed. 

Napoleon,  seated  on  "Marengo,"  beside  a  little  white  chapel 
that  still  looks  out  upon  the  battle  ground  from  a  fir  crowned 
height,  was  viewing  the  havoc  he  had  wrought  when,  dripping 
with  blood.  General  Rapp  dashed  up  with  a  Russian  prince 
as  his  prisoner,  and  his  escort  bearing  aloft  many  captured 
flags.  The  mameluke,  baffled  of  his  grand  ducal  prey,  came  at 
the  same  time  to  explain  his  failure  to  catch  Constantine  and 
bring  his  head  to  the  Emperor.  A  wounded  chasseur  bearing 
a  Russian  standard  also  presented  himself  and  proudly  stood 
at  attention  for  a  moment  before  falling  dead  at  Napoleon's 
feet.  Wlien  the  Emperor  ordered  Gerard  to  paint  the  scene 
for  the  walls  of  Versailles,  he  commanded  the  artist  to  include 
the  chasseur  and  the  mameluke  as  well  as  Rapp  in  his  famous 
picture  of  that  moment  of  triumph. 

Meanwhile  Soult  had  whirled  to  the  aid  of  Davout,  who  was 
holding  back  the  Allies  in  their  struggle  to  get  around  the 
French  right  and  Vandamme  had  come  in  behind  them.  The 
roar  of  the  artillery  now  shook  the  hills  and  great  wreaths  of 


202     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

smoke  curled  about  them.  The  streets  of  the  little  villages 
which  had  been  taken  and  retaken  in  the  desperate  fighting 
were  choked  with  the  dead  and  wounded,  whose  bodies  had 
become  a  barricade  against  the  advance  of  the  allies. 

Turning  to  flee  from  Davout  and  Soult  in  front  of  them,  the 
Russians  and  Austrians  found  Vandamme  in  their  rear  with 
the  guns  of  Pratzen  blazing  at  them  on  one  side  and  ponds  and 
marshes  hemming  them  in  on  the  other.  They  were  caught  in 
a  cage  and  could  only  hurl  themselves  against  its  iron  bars. 
Batteries  were  abandoned  in  a  wild  flight.  Some  Russians  did 
succeed  in  cutting  their  way  through  to  Austerlitz,  and  many 
thousands  fled  in  the  opposite  direction  across  the  frozen  ponds. 
These  tried  to  drag  their  artillery  after  them,  but  the  ice  gave 
way  under  the  weight,  and,  to  save  themselves,  they  had  to 
leave  everything  behind. 

' '  Fire  upon  those  masses, ' '  Napoleon  commanded  as  he  saw 
the  Russians  making  good  their  escape  over  the  glare  of  the 
pond ;  "they  must  be  drowned.  Fire  upon  the  ice ! "  But  the 
balls  from  the  artillery  on  the  side  of  Pratzen  rolled  harmlessly 
upon  the  frozen  surface  until  some  light  howitzers  were  ele- 
vated and  opened  an  almost  perpendicular  fire.  The  ice 
cracked  under  this  assault  and  perhaps  2000  of  the  Russians 
disappeared  beneath  it.  «» 

As  they  went  down,  the  sinking  Russians  ceased  to  be  ene- 
mies in  arms  and  became  friends  in  need.  With  the  quick  re- 
action from  savagery"  to  humanity,  characteristic  of  warfare, 
the  French  turned  rescuers,  Marbot  winning  special  praise 
from  Napoleon  by  swimming  out  to  a  floe  on  which  a  Russian 
officer  was  floating. 

Night  fell  like  a  drop  curtain  on  the  theatre  of  the  battle. 
When  Napoleon  made  his  way  among  the  dead  on  his  usual 
visit  to  the  wounded  in  the  wretched  hospitals,  a  gentle  snow 
was  covering  with  its  mantle  the  uncounted  slain  on  the  field 
of  Austerlitz.  The  French  had  lost  probably  10,000  killed 
and  wounded  and  the  Allies  25,000.  La  Jeune,  an  aide-de- 
camp, while  crossing  the  field  five  days  after  the  battle,  came 
upon  fourteen  Russians,  who,  wounded  and  left  on  the  ground 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ  203 

where  they  fell,  had  dragged  themselves  together  to  keep  warm, 
and  two  were  still  alive. 

The  Grand  Army  bivouacked  in  the  camp  from  which  they 
had  driven  the  Allies,  and  Napoleon  congratulated  his  troops 
in  a  proclamation.  "Soldiers,  I  am  satisfied  with  you,"  was 
praise  enough  for  them,  coming  as  it  did  from  their  Emperor, 
who  promised  to  lead  them  back  to  France  where  ' '  it  will  suf- 
fice you  to  say  'I  was  at  Austerlitz'  for  the  people  to  answer 
'  There  stands  a  brave  man ! '  "  But  many  marches  and  battles 
lay  between  them  and  their  homes,  and  thousands  among  that 
jubilant  host  were  yet  to  find  graves  in  alien  earth. 

By  an  imperial  decree,  the  Emperor  adopted  all  the  children 
of  the  men  killed  at  Austerlitz,  and  conferred  upon  them  the 
proud  privilege  of  coupling  with  their  own  the  name  of  Na- 
poleon, which,  ten  years  before,  he  himself  had  detested  as 
too  foreign-sounding  in  the  ears  of  the  French !  He  also  gave 
a  pledge  to  educate  the  orphaned  at  his  expense ;  after  that 
"the  boys  shall  be  placed  in  situations  and  the  girls  married 
by  us." 

The  vanquished  Emperors,  with  the  fragments  of  their  army, 
were  wandering  off  in  the  direction  of  Hungary,  but  the  Aus- 
trian monarch  had  left  behind  an  envoy  to  sue  for  peace.  This 
was  the  same  Prince  Lichtenstein  whom  General  Melas  had 
appointed  his  commissioner  to  Napoleon  after  the  Battle  of 
Marengo.  Through  the  night  the  Prince  searched  for  the 
victor  of  Austerlitz,  whom  he  found  only  at  dawn  in  a  mis- 
erable roadside  tavern.  There  he  arranged  a  meeting  of  the 
two  Emperors  beside  an  old  windmill,  whither  the  Moravian 
farmers,  in  their  big  boots  and  big  caps,  still  take  grain  to 
be  ground. 

By  that  windmill  Napoleon  looked  upon  an  hereditaiy  Em- 
peror for  the  first  time.  "I  receive  you,"  he  said  to  Francis, 
as  he  pointed  to  his  bivouac,  "in  the  only  palace  which  you 
have  permitted  me  to  occupy  the  past  two  months."  And 
Francis  happily  replied :  ' '  You  have  made  such  good  use  of 
it  that  I  don't  think  you  have  any  cause  to  complain." 

In  the  negotiations  which  eventuated  in  the  Treaty  of  Press- 


204  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

burg,  the  Emperor  Francis  agreed  to  the  conqueror's  de- 
mands. Austria  ceded  to  him  Venice,  Venetia,  and  the  Tren- 
tino,  thus  giving  up  her  last  foothold  in  Italy.  She  also 
parted  with  Dalmatia,  the  opposite  coast  of  the  Adriatic,  a 
cession  which  gave  Napoleon  many  coveted  harbours  to  shut 
against  British  commerce. 

The  Peace  of  Pressburg  not  only  cost  Francis  rich  dominions, 
but  it  also  cost  him  the  respect  of  his  Allies.  They  had  pledged 
themselves  to  stand  or  fall  together  and  not  to  treat  separately 
with  the  foe.  Francis,  however,  finding  himself  without  an 
army,  and  cut  off  from  his  capital,  had  broken  his  promise  to 
Kussia  and  England. 

Although  his  first  battle  had  disappointed  his  confident  ex- 
pectation of  reaping  a  harvest  of  martial  glory,  the  young  Czar 
refused  to  follow  the  Austrian  Emperor  into  the  conqueror's 
camp  by  the  windmill.  Without  even  a  servant  to  attend  him, 
Alexander  ran  away  to  live  to  fight  another  day. 

Austria  having  no  reason  to  enshrine  Austerlitz,  and  the 
place  being  remote  from  the  main  roads  of  foreign  travellers, 
the  battle  ground  is  little  visited.  The  castle,  which  belongs 
to  a  Moravian  family  of  counts,  is  more  a  beautiful  villa  than  a 
castle,  its  walls  rising  in  a  pretty  park  in  the  very  centre  of 
the  tidy  village.  The  memory  of  Napoleon  eclipses  that  of 
all  other  guests  of  the  castle,  including  the  two  Emperors 
whom  he  drove  forth  from  its  hospitality  into  a  December 
night.  And  "Napoleon's  room,"  "Napoleon's  bed,"  "Na- 
poleon's chair,"  and  "Napoleon's  table"  are  the  proudest  ex- 
hibits offered  to  the  curious  pilgrim. 

While  the  battle  tide  flowed  to  the  very  walls  of  Austerlitz 
on  the  east,  the  western  boundary  of  the  scene  of  combat  is 
fully  eight  miles  away  on  the  road  to  Brunn.  Not  far  from 
the  true  centre,  rises  the  green  slopes  of  Pratzen,  crowned  by 
the  only  monument  that  marks  the  field  of  strife,  a  huge  grey- 
stone  memorial  erected  on  the  centenary  of  the  fight. 

From  those  Pratzen  heights  the  battle  ground  of  the  three 
Emperors  rolls  away  in  every  direction,  crossed  here  and  there 
by  the  brooks  that  one  day  ran  with  the  blood  of  many  na- 
tions, and  dotted  over  with  the  little  stone  villages  that  bore 


THE  SUN  OF  AUSTERLITZ  205 

the  brunt  of  the  onslaught.  The  pond  where  the  fleeing  Rus- 
sians were  drowned,  however,  is  no  more  to  be  seen,  its  bed 
having  been  drained  and  converted  into  tillage.  For  until  the 
gathering  clouds  of  another  war  burst  upon  the  Austro-Russian 
frontier  in  1914,  thrift  was  written  across  the  entire  face  of 
that  countryside  which  smiled  in  peace  above  the  graves  of  the 
thousands  who  had  fallen  in  battle  where  the  waving  grain 
blossomed  in  their  dust. 


CHAPTEE  XXV 

THE  ^lATCHIMAKER 

THE  conquest  of  Austria  completed  and  the  spoils  of  vic- 
tory secured,  Napoleon  proceeded  to  Munich,  where 
Josephine  awaited  him.  Having  vanquished  at  Aus- 
terlitz  the  ancient  Holy  Roman  Empire,  he  felt  entitled  now 
to  demand  royal  alliances  for  the  new  empire,  and  at  IMunich 
he  began  his  imperial  matchmaking  with  the  sovereign  of 
Bavaria.  Arranging  the  details  of  the  match  with  the  speed 
of  a  military  manoeuvre,  he  marched  the  couple  to  the  altar 
at  double  quick. 

Eugene  Beauharnais,  now  a  prince  and  the  viceroy  of  Italy, 
was  to  be  the  happy  groom  on  that  occasion,  and  his  happiness 
was  announced  to  him  by  Napoleon  in  the  terms  of  a  battle 
command.  Eugene  obediently  flew  over  the  Alps  from  his 
vice  regal  post  at  Milan,  while  his  stepfather  impatiently 
waited  to  see  the  marriage  celebrated  before  returning  to  Paris. 
It  chanced  that  the  bride,  the  Princess  Augusta  was  already 
betrothed  to  the  heir  of  the  reigning  house  of  Baden ;  but  that 
circumstance  did  not  balk  Napoleon.  He  promised  to  pro- 
vide another  bride  for  the  Baden  heir,  and  he  gave  him 
Stephanie  Beauharnais,  a  distant  cousin-in-law  of  Josephine. 

While  he  was  arranging  marriages  from  the  highest  throne 
on  earth,  with  the  hands  of  nearly  all  the  princes  and  princesses 
in  Europe  at  his  command,  Napoleon  increasingly  regretted 
the  matches  made  by  his  family  in  humbler  days.  With  a 
little  foresight  and  patient  waiting,  the  Bonapartes  might  all 
have  made  royal  marriages  that  would  have  bound  him  to 
every  reigning  house  in  Europe.  The  latest  to  wed  was  his 
youngest  brother,  Jerome,  and  on  his  unauthorised  alliance, 
the  imperial  displeasure  fell  in  full  force. 

Jerome  had  been  placed  in  the  navy,   and  after  tedious 

206 


THE  MATCHMAKER  207 

cruising  in  the  tropic  waters  of  the  West  Indies  and  rising  to 
a  lieutenancy,  the  young  man  landed  at  Norfolk,  Va.,  in  the 
summer  of  1803.  At  Baltimore,  he  met  the  eighteen-year-old 
daughter  of  William  Paterson,  an  Irish  immigrant  who  had 
won  his  way  from  poverty  to  the  rank  of  the  richest  merchants 
in  America.  While  it  was  said  of  Elizabeth,  or  Betsy,  now 
that  we  have  been  properly  introduced  to  her,  that  "she 
charms  by  her  eyes  and  slays  by  her  tongue,"  her  deadlier 
weapon  spared  Jerom.e  at  that  first  meeting  and  left  him 
wholly  charmed.  In  one  swift  month  more  the  wooer  an- 
nounced his  engagement,  and  in  a  few  days  took  out  a  marriage 
license. 

The  French  consul  general  warned  the  Patersons  that  by 
the  law  of  Prance  the  marriage  of  a  man  under  twenty -five  was 
not  legal  unless  with  the  consent  of  a  parent  or  a  guardian. 
Nevertheless,  Jerome  and  Bets}^  were  married  by  John  Carroll, 
Roman  Catholic  Bishop  of  Baltimore  on  Christmas  eve. 

Although  President  Jefferson  received  the  bride  and  groom 
at  the  White  House,  he  expressed  the  fear,  in  a  despatch  to  his 
minister  at  Paris,  that  Napoleon  might  take  it  into  his  head 
to  call  the  President  of  the  United  States  to  account  for  per- 
mitting the  wedding  to  take  place.  Jefferson  thoughtfully 
prepared  Livingston,  in  the  event  of  a  Napoleonic  outburst,  to 
give  assurance  that  not  only  was  the  President  powerless  under 
American  law,  but  also  that  Jerome's  father-in-law  was  "the 
wealthiest  man  in  Maryland,  perhaps  in  the  United  States, 
except  Mr.  Carroll" — Charles  Carroll  of  Carrollton. 

As  fast  as  sails  could  take  him,  Betsy 's  brother  Robert  sped 
to  Paris  with  a  letter  from  James  Madison,  secretary  of  state, 
commending  him  to  the  good  offices  of  Robert  R.  Livingston, 
the  American  minister  in  France.  For  the  bride  had  two  in- 
fluential uncles  at  Washington,  Robert  Smith,  secretary  of  the 
navy,  and  Samuel  Smith,  who  had  just  been  elected  to  the 
senate  and  was  now  sitting  in  the  special  session  called  to  ratify 
the  purchase  of  Louisiana  from  Napoleon. 

Robert  Paterson  could  find  no  one  in  Paris  who  dared  inter- 
cede for  him.  IMinister  Livingston  was  too  good  a  diplomat 
to  rush  into  a  family  row,  and  Napoleon  said  that  such  a  mar- 


208  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

riage  as  Jerome's  was  "no  more  real  than  if  it  had  been  be- 
tween two  lovers  who  marry  in  a  garden  on  the  altar  of  love 
in  the  presence  of  the  moon  and  stars. ' '  In  strict  accordance 
with  his  favourite  strategy,  he  cut  off  Jerome's  supplies,  leav- 
ing him  dependent  on  his  wife's  family,  while  he  com- 
manded that  the  bridegroom  should  leave  "in  America  the 
young  person  in  question, ' '  and  ' '  come  hither  to  associate  him- 
self to  my  fortunes." 

The  obedient  senate  of  France  decreed  that  no  civil  officer 
should  record  "the  pretended  marriage"  of  Jerome,  while 
the  new  Emperor  forbade  any  French  vessel  to  bring  his  Amer- 
ican sister-in-law  across  the  water,  and  forbade  any  French 
port  to  permit  her  to  enter  the  Empire.  "She  shall  not  set 
foot  on  the  soil  of  France,"  he  declared. 

Jerome  and  Betsy  thus  were  presented  with  a  problem  in 
blockade  running.  How  was  he  to  steal  through  his  brother's 
tightly  drawn  lines  and  take  Betsy  into  France  ?  Many  were 
their  adventures  even  before  they  had  succeeded  in  clearing 
the  American  coast.  Finally  her  father  fitted  out  for  the 
couple  one  of  his  own  ships,  the  Erin,  and  they  sailed  under 
the  American  flag. 

With  the  French  ports  all  closed  to  it,  the  Erin  put  in  at 
Lisbon,  where  the  French  consul  came  aboard  and  inquired  of 
the  bride,  "What  can  I  do  for  Miss  Paterson?"  The  "miss" 
spiritedly  replied:  "Tell  your  master  that  Mme.  Bonaparte 
is  ambitious,  and  demands  her  rights  as  a  member  of  the  im- 
perial family ! ' ' 

Jerome  was  confident  that  he  needed  only  to  arrange  to  have 
Napoleon  expose  himself  to  Betsy's  beauty  and  wit  to  insure 
her  conquest  of  the  Emperor.  Filled  no  doubt  with  high 
hopes  of  bringing  the  two  together,  he  left  his  wife  in  Lisbon 
harbour  to  go  to  his  brother. 

The  groom,  however,  found  admission  to  the  imperial  pres- 
ence barred  until  he  surrendered  without  conditions.  His 
approaching  obligations  as  a  father  constituted  no  valid  argu- 
ment with  the  Emperor.  Apparently  they  were  borne  lightly 
enough  by  Jerome  himself,  who,  after  eleven  days,  submitted 
himself  absolutely  to  his  brother. 


THE  MATCHMAKER  209 

"So,  sir,"  the  Emperor  said  to  the  youth  of  the  white 
feather,  "you  shamefully  abandoned  your  post!  It  will  re- 
quire many  splendid  actions  to  wipe  out  that  stain.  As  to 
your  love  affair  with  your  little  girl,  I  do  not  regard  it."  As 
Napoleon  bowed  the  penitent  out,  he  remarked  to  his  suite: 
"He  needs  a  little  more  weight  in  his  head,  but  I  hope  to 
make  something  of  him." 

In  three  months  more  Jerome 's  dishonour  was  complete  when 
he  stood  before  the  world  a  faithless  father  as  well  as  a  faith- 
less husband,  his  deserted  wife  giving  birth  to  a  son  in  a 
London  suburb  and  dutifully  christening  him  Jerome  Napoleon 
Bonaparte.  The  baby  hands  did  not  prove  strong  enough  to 
draw  Jerome  away  from  his  vanity,  and  Betsy,  giving  up 
hope,  sailed  home.  And  she  accepted  such  solace  for  her 
wounded  pride  as  a  pension  of  $12,000  a  year  from  Napoleon 
afforded. 

Jerome,  after  idling  about  the  sea  for  awhile,  was  rewarded 
first  with  the  rank  of  rear  admiral  and  then  with  the  title  of 
prince,  not  to  mention  the  payment  of  his  always  rapidly 
accumulating  debts.  "  It  is  inconceivable, ' '  Napoleon  growled, 
"how  much  this  young  man  costs  me."  But  he  w^rote  to 
Joseph:  "I  have  recognised  him  as  a  prince  and  I  have 
given  him  the  grand  cordon  of  the  Legion  of  Honour.  I  have 
arranged  his  marriage  with  Princess  Catherine,  daughter  of 
the  King  of  Wiirtemberg. ' ' 

Although  a  heavj^^  liability  in  a  financial  way,  the  youth  was 
an  asset  to  the  imperial  matrimonial  bureau,  and  Napoleon 
made  haste  to  ask  Pope  Pius  VII  to  annul  the  Baltimore  mar- 
riage in  a  religious  sense  as  it  already  was  annulled  by  civil 
procedure.  He  assured  the  Pope  that  his  brother  had  been 
married  by  a  Spanish  priest  to  "a  Protestant  young 
woman," 

The  Holy  See  knew  the  true  facts  and  braved  the  imperial 
displeasure  by  declining  to  invalidate  a  marriage  with  a  Chris- 
tian of  any  faith  that  had  been  performed  by  a  bishop  of  the 
church.  But  the  royal  house  of  Wiirtemberg,  being  Protes- 
tant, was  not  troubled  by  the  refusal  of  Rome  to  sanction  the 
match,  and  in  a  little  more  than  two  years  after  his  parting 


210     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

from  Betsy,  Jerome  became  the  husband  of  the  Princess 
Catherine. 

Some  time  after  the  costly  youth  had  been  elevated  to  the 
throne  of  Westphalia  and  Napoleon  had  unloaded  him  upon 
the  poor  taxpayers  of  his  new  realm,  Jerome  grew  generous 
toward  Betsy  with  the  money  of  his  subjects.  He  offered  her 
$40,000  a  year  in  place  of  the  $12,000  she  was  receiving  from 
Napoleon  if  she  would  bring  their  boy  and  live  in  Westpha- 
lia. 

But  Betsy  was  not  a  woman  to  be  twice  fooled  by  the  same 
person  and  she  replied  to  Jerome,  that  ' '  the  kingdom  of  West- 
phalia is  not  large  enough  for  two  queens"  and  furthermore 
that  she  preferred  her  present  position  of  "being  sheltered 
under  the  wing  of  an  eagle  to  being  suspended  from  the  bill 
of  a  goose."  Wlien  the  eagle  heard  of  that  witty  retort,  he 
enjoyed  it  so  much  that  he  instructed  the  French  minister  at 
Washington  to  ask  Betsy  what  he  could  do  for  her.  She  an- 
swered, "Make  me  a  duchess;"  but  it  continued  to  be  her  lot 
to  dwell  on  a  level  of  equality  "with  people  who  after  I  had 
married  a  prince  became  my  inferiors." 

When  the  kingdom  of  Westphalia  was  no  more  and  Jerome's 
glory  had  departed,  he  and  Betsy  met  for  the  first  and  only 
time  after  their  parting  in  the  harbour  of  Lisbon.  He  was 
now  a  bankrupt,  and  she  had  divorced  him  to  protect  her 
property.  They  passed  without  a  word  of  greeting  as  each  was 
strolling  in  the  picture  gallery  of  the  Pitti  Palace  at  Florence, 
Jerome  merely  jerking  his  thumb  toward  Betsy  and  remarking 
to  Catherine,  "That  is  my  American  wife." 

Both  Jerome  and  Catherine  often  saw  young  Jerome  Na- 
poleon, but  his  father  ignored  him  in  his  will.  Emperor 
Napoleon  III  offered  to  make  him  a  duke,  but  with  the  vanity 
of  his  race,  this  American  Bonaparte  refused  to  relinquish  his 
pretensions  to  a  higher  dignity,  that  of  a  prince  of  the  Empire 
and  a  legitimate  heir  to  the  throne. 

Although  his  mother  never  foreswore  her  native  Presby- 
terianism,  she  reared  Jerome  a  Catholic,  because  that  was  to 
her  "the  religion  of  princes  and  kings."  She  entered  him  at 
Harvard,  where  he  graduated,  and  greatly  to  his  mother's 


THE  MATCHMAKER  211 

grief,  he  so  far  forgot  his  princely  rank  as  to  make  an  Ameri- 
can marriage. 

Two  sons  were  born  to  this  second  Jerome.  The  younger, 
Charles  Joseph  Bonaparte,  became  attorney  general  in  Presi- 
dent Roosevelt's  cabinet,  while  the  elder  was  the  late  Col. 
Jerome  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  a  graduate  of  West  Point,  who 
married  Caroline  Le  Roy,  daughter  of  Samuel  Appleton  of 
Boston,  and  granddaughter  of  Daniel  Webster.  Their  son, 
Jerome  Napoleon  Bonaparte  of  Washington,  is  the  great- 
grandson  of  King  Jerome  and  great-grandnephew  of  Napoleon. 
If  his  great-grandmother's  marriage  had  been  recognised,  this 
young  man  in  Washington  would  be  the  head  of  the  house  of 
Bonaparte  and  first  in  line  for  the  vanished  throne  of  Na- 
poleon, instead  of  King  Jerome's  other  great-grandson,  Victor 
of  Brussels. 

Betsy  ever  remained  faithful  to  the  Empire  that  banned  her. 
Long  after  it  had  fallen,  she  continued  to  wander  about  Eu- 
rope where  she  could  humour  her  conceit  by  mingling  with 
titled  people.  To  her  hard-headed  father's  protest  against  her 
forsaking  her  place  as  the  head  of  his  household,  she  replied : 
"It  was  impossible  to  bend  my  tastes  and  ambitions  to  the 
obscure  destiny  of  a  Baltimore  housekeeper,  and  it  was  absurd 
to  attempt  it  after  I  had  married  the  brother  of  an  Emperor." 
When  at  length  she  did  return  to  America  it  was  to  take  up 
the  management  of  her  estate  in  her  native  city. 

After  the  Second  Empire  had  risen  from  the  ruins  of  the 
First  at  Waterloo  and  fallen  at  Sedan,  and  she  was  four  score 
and  ten,  Mrae.  Bonaparte  still  did  her  own  bargaining  and  col- 
lecting as  she  went  through  the  streets  of  Baltimore,  an  old 
carpet  bag  in  her  hand.  Although  reputed  to  be  more  than  a 
millionaire,  she  passed  the  last  eighteen  years  of  her  life  in 
a  boarding  house,  where  in  her  many  trunks  she  cherished  her 
fondest  treasures — the  purple  satin  coat  Jerome  wore  at  their 
wedding,  a  gown  given  to  her  by  the  Princess  Pauline,  an- 
other from  ]\Ime.  Mere  and  all  the  other  faded  finery  of  the 
days  of  her  imperial  dreams. 

Is  not  the  gravestone  of  Betsy  Paterson,  in  Greenmount 
Cemetery,  near  the  Union  railway  station  of  Baltimore,   a 


212     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

marker  in  the  path  of  Napoleon  to  his  downfall?  Perhaps  it 
was  in  dissolving  her  marriage  that  the  Emperor  took  the  first 
fateful  step  toward  his  own  divorce.  At  least  it  lost  him  a 
sister,  whose  loyalty  to  his  throne  would  have  been  an  example 
to  his  own  sisters,  whose  thrift  and  ambition  would  have  been 
useful  to  the  prodigal  and  silly  Jerome,  and  whose  beauty  of 
person  and  purity  of  life  would  have  done  credit  to  the  court 
of  the  Empire. 


CHAPTEB  XXVI 
THE  KINGMAKER 

WHEN,  on  the  first  anniversary  of  his  coronation,  Na- 
poleon gained  the  great  battle  with  his  two  rival 
Emperors  at  Austerlitz,  he  stood  forth  the  chief 
magistrate  of  Christendom,  He  lost  no  time  in  assuming  the 
imperial  prerogative  to  crown  his  vassal  princes. 

There  were  then  only  eight  kings  in  Europe,  the  Kings  of 
England,  Prussia,  Spain,  Portugal,  Denmark,  Sweden,  Sar- 
dinia, and  Naples.  Napoleon  opened  wide  the  flood  gates  of 
royal  honours  and  there  was  a  downpour  of  ten  kingly  crowns 
in  half  a  dozen  years,  or  more  than  time  had  conferred  upon 
princely  brows  in  as  many  centuries.  He  had  already  made 
himself  King  of  Italy,  and  now  on  his  way  from  the  field  of 
Austerlitz  in  December,  1805,  he  sent  a  messenger,  who  over- 
took the  Elector  of  Bavaria  while  he  was  hunting,  with  a  mes- 
sage addressed  to  "His  Majesty,  the  King  of  Bavaria." 
Wherefore  the  Bavarian  sovereigns  are  kings  to  this  day.  The 
Kings  of  Wiirtemberg  and  Saxony  also  are  indebted  to  Na- 
poleon for  their  present  titles. 

The  new  Emperor's  success  as  a  kingmaker  flattered  him 
into  the  conceit  that  in  the  plenitude  of  his  imperial  power  he 
could  do  more  than  make  over  hereditary  dukes  and  electors, 
and  could  manufacture  kings  out  of  the  raw  material  of  the 
common  earth.  After  he  had  fairly  warned  the  domineering 
wife  of  the  Bourbon  King  of  Naples  that  if  she  did  not  cease 
playing  fast  and  loose  with  France,  her  children  would  curse 
her  as  they  wandered  over  Europe  begging  their  bread,  he 
drove  the  royal  family  from  their  capital  to  take  refuge  on  the 
Island  of  Sicily.  Thereupon,  in  1806,  Joseph  Bonaparte  was 
thrust  upon  the  vacant  throne. 

' '  I  can  no  longer  have  relatives  in  obscurity, ' '  the  Emperor 

213 


214  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

said.  "Those  who  will  not  rise  with  me,  shall  no  longer  be  of 
my  family.  I  am  making  a  family  of  kings  attached  to  my 
federative  system." 

The  Revolution  had  expelled  the  House  of  Orange  from  Hol- 
land and  set  up  the  Batavian  Republic  in  the  Netherlands. 
AYhen  Napoleon  prepared  to  remove  this  republican  reminder 
from  the  French  border,  he  placed  the  crown  of  Holland  on 
the  head  of  Louis  Bonaparte.  At  one  time  he  thought  of 
snatching  the  crown  of  Portugal  from  the  brow  of  the  Braganza 
king  and  conferring  it  on  Lucien  Bonaparte.  Lucien,  how- 
ever, rejected  the  stipulation  that  he  should  divorce  his  wife, 
and  in  loyalty  to  her,  he  turned  his  back  on  crowns  and  thrones. 

Jerome  was  the  only  obedient  member  of  the  family,  but 
when  he  was  enthroned  as  King  of  Westphalia  in  1807,  his 
regal  magnificence  and  royal  vices  troubled  his  brother  much, 
and  he  was  as  hopelessly  incompetent  as  any  hereditary  prince 
well  could  be.  His  poor  subjects  had  to  plough  deep  to  sup- 
port his  pomp  and  luxury,  and  he  drained  the  resources  of  his 
made-to-order  kingdom  to  fill  his  little  capital,  Cassel,  with 
extravagant  splendour.  His  royal  theatre  alone  cost  his  people 
$80,000  a  year,  and  he  adorned  his  country  palace.  Napoleon- 
shoe,  until  it  took  high  rank  among  the  show  places  of  Europe. 
By  a  strange  retribution  Napoleonshoe  became  the  prison  of 
Napoleon  III,  after  his  capture  by  the  Germans  at  Sedan,  in 
1870,  and  it  was  there  that  the  last  of  the  Bonapartes  took 
leave  of  royal  palaces  forever. 

By  a  trick  of  nature  Napoleon  found  his  only  real  brothers 
among  his  sisters.  Although,  even  as  the  effeminate  emperors 
of  degenerate  Rome  assumed  the  name  of  Caesar,  the  crowned 
brothers  all  styled  themselves  Napoleons — Joseph  Napoleon, 
Louis  Napoleon,  Jerome  Napoleon — Caroline  and  Elisa  were 
better  counterfeits  of  the  Emperor  than  any  of  the  male  Bona- 
partes. Those  two  sisters  were  ambitious  and  masterful  spirits, 
while  in  point  of  personal  appearance  they  held  their  own  in  a 
remarkably  handsome  family.  The  elder,  Caroline,  wife  of 
Murat,  had  fair  hair  and  a  dazzling  complexion,  with  roses  in 
her  cheeks.  ' '  She  bore  the  head  of  Cromwell,  on  the  shoulders 
of  a  pretty  woman, ' '  Talleyrand  said  of  her. 


Princes  OF  Till-:  Xkw  I.\irKiiiAi.  Iamh.v  .wd   iiii;  Kaiukk  ok  N  aimi.kox 
1,    Eugene    Beauharnais,    2,    Jerome    Bonaparte,    3,    the    Father    of 
Napoleon,   4,  Joseph   Bonaparte,   5,   Louis,   6,   Lucien 


\ 

THE  KINGMAKER  215 

As  the  one  sister  who  had  a  husband  that  was  useful  to  the 
Empire,  she  made  hard  terms  with  her  brother  on  every  occa- 
sion. To  appease  the  demands  of  the  Murats,  the  Emperor 
was  forced  to  a  painful  bit  of  surgery  when  he  carved  out  a 
principality  for  them  in  Germany  and  created  them  the  Prince 
and  Princess  of  Berg  and  the  Duke  and  Duchess  of  Cleves. 
Besides,  Murat  was  made  heir  to  the  throne  of  Naples, 
Joseph's  children  being  girls. 

Elisa,  the  other  Napoleon  in  petticoats,  was  the  black  haired 
sister  and  less  beautiful,  although  not  at  all  uncomely.  Elisa 
had  a  Corsican  husband,  Felix  Bacciocchi,  who  was  a  hin- 
drance rather  than  an  aid  to  her  passion  for  place  and  power. 
But  being  a  clever  pupil  of  Machiavelli,  she  overcame  the 
handicap  of  a  stupid  and  useless  mate  and  merited  the  fame  of 
a  Semiramis.  This  princess  drew  for  Felix  and  herself  the 
tiny  principality  of  Piombino — now  the  Italian  mainland  port 
for  the  island  of  Elba — with  only  20,000  subjects,  but  soon  she 
won  the  duchy  of  Lucca,  and  ultimately  became  the  Grand 
Duchess  of  Tuscany,  with  the  noble  city  of  Florence  for  her 
capital. 

The  second  sister  in  rank  of  birth,  but  the  third  in  im- 
portance, was  Pauline,  who  was  a  Jerome  in  frivolity  of  char- 
acter, but  a  Venus  in  the  charms  of  her  person.  She  received 
an  Italian  principality,  with  six  square  miles  of  territory 
and  3000  inhabitants,  mostly  beggars.  But  that  sufficed  to 
make  her  the  Duchess  of  Guastalla. 

Happily  there  was  one  Bonaparte  whom  fame  could  not 
flatter,  and  whose  head  was  not  turned  by  fortune.  The  only 
reproach  that  history  can  bring  to  the  memory  of  the  ' '  ]\Iother 
of  Kings"  is  that  she  failed  to  transmit  her  virtues  to  her 
children.  If  Napoleon's  imagination  had  been  ballasted  with 
the  rock  of  her  common  sense,  he  might  not  have  soared  so 
high — but  then  he  would  not  have  fallen  so  far ;  if  his  genius 
had  been  touched  with  her  prudence,  he  might  have  ruled  him- 
self and  thereby  become  the  ruler  of  the  world.  Given  her 
solidity  and  strength  of  character,  her  other  sons,  their  vanity 
in  check,  might  have  become  men.  Had  her  daughters  in- 
herited with  her  beauty  her  womanly  purity,  and  like  her  kept 


216     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

themselves  unspotted  from  the  world,  they  might  have  been 
ladies.  As  it  chanced,  alas,  her  children  were  not  this  Cor- 
nelia's jewels,  but  her  sorrows. 

A  typical  Italian  mother,  than  whom  there  is  no  better  pat- 
tern, Letizia  saw  seven  of  her  eight  children  ascend  thrones 
only  to  mourn  the  loss  of  her  family.  ''All  men  considered 
me,"  she  confided  to  a  friend,  "the  happiest  mother  in  the 
world  while  my  life  was  one  uninterrupted  sorrow  and  martyr- 
dom." 

The  higher  her  children  climbed  the  more  she  felt  a  mother's 
anxiety  for  the  perils  that  encompassed  them.  "With  eight 
diadems  in  her  family,  motherhood  remained  her  only  crown. 
For  in  supreme  good  taste,  the  kingmaker  left  her  in  posses- 
sion of  the  simple  title  of  mother.  He  only  decreed  that  she 
should  be  addressed  as  "Her  Imperial  Highness,  Mme.  the 
Mother  of  the  Emperor,"  and  the  world  spoke  of  her  as  "Mme. 
Mere." 

The  mother  could  not  forget  the  hard,  pinching  days  that 
befell  her  brood  in  Ajaccio  and  Marseilles,  although  every  one 
of  them  except  Lucien  now  had  some  sort  of  throne.  "All  this 
pomp  may  come  to  an  end,"  she  persisted  in  reasoning,  "and 
then  what  will  become  of  my  children?"  Let  the  sun  of 
Austerlitz  beam  and  the  star  of  destiny  shine  ever  so  bril- 
liantly in  the  fair  sky,  her  prudent  maternal  nature  took  ac- 
count of  the  possible  coming  of  a  rainy  day. 

Napoleon  looked  to  his  brothers  to  give  him  an  heir  to  the 
throne  of  France.  In  the  lottery  of  birth,  however,  Joseph's 
two  children  were  girls,  as  also  were  the  two  children  of  Lucien 
by  his  only  recognised  wife,  Christine  Boyer.  Lucien  had  a 
son  by  the  disinherited  second  wife  and  Jerome  another  by 
the  disowned  Betsy  Paterson ;  but  those  children  were  barred 
from  the  imperial  line. 

When  the  Empire  came,  only  Louis  and  Hortense  had  sons 
in  the  recognised  line.  Josephine  thus  was  consoled  by  the 
prospect  of  a  grandchild  of  hers  being  adopted  as  the  heir  to 
the  imperial  crown,  while  her  own  son  Eugene  had  already 
been  adopted  by  the  Emperor  and  nominated  to  succeed  him 
on  the  throne  of  Italy.     Napoleon  Charles,  the  elder  of  Louis' 


THE  KINGMAKER  217 

boys,  was  looked  upon  as  the  destined  successor  of  Napoleon. 
The  child  was  a  great  joy  to  "Uncle  Bibiche,"  as  he  dared 
to  nickname  the  Emperor,  who  delighted  to  roll  on  the  palace 
floor  and  romp  with  the  boy  or  hold  him  on  the  back  of  a 
gazelle  in  the  imperial  park.  In  his  pride  and  affection,  Na- 
poleon Charles  used  to  shout  at  the  review  of  the  Guard  in 
the  courtyard,  "Long  live  Uncle  Bibiche,  the  soldier!" 

While  the  Emperor  was  going  his  conquering  way  across 
the  northernmost  plains  of  Prussia  in  the  springtime  of  1807, 
a  messenger  brought  him  the  news  of  the  little  Prince's  death 
at  The  Hague  in  his  fifth  year.  By  the  death  of  the  boy,  the 
childless  monarch  was  brought  face  to  face  with  a  momentous 
question,  which  disturbed  the  very  foundation  of  his  Empire 
and  threatened  the  stability  of  the  institutions  he  had  reared. 
It  was  the  old  troubling  and  unanswered  question  which  had 
stung  him  to  exclaim,  ' '  After  me  the  deluge !  My  brothers 
or  some  successors  will  fight  over  my  tomb  like  the  followers  of 
Alexander. ' ' 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

CRUSHING  PRUSSIA 

1806     AGE   37 

AT  the  opening  of  the  ninteenth  century,  Germany  still 
remained  a  prey  to  the  tribal  system  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  There  were  nearly  if  not  quite  as  many  na- 
tions in  the  few  hundred  miles  between  the  Rhine  and  the 
Niemen  as  there  are  independent  sovereignties  on  the  entire 
face  of  the  earth  to-day.  A  traveller  may  circunmavigate  the 
globe  now  without  crossing  more  frontiers  or  passing  through 
more  customhouses  than  barred  trade  and  communication  be- 
tween the  German  people  only  a  little  more  than  100  years 
ago.  Political  progress  was  dead  among  them  and  patriotism 
unborn. 

Prussia  was  the  natural  leader  of  Germany,  being  by  far  the 
largest  strictly  German  state.  But  she  was  yet  only  Prussian 
and  cared  little  for  Germany  as  a  whole.  The  reigning  family 
of  Hohenzollerns  played  politics  as  a  sordid  game  of  grabbing 
and  cheating,  looking  only  to  increasing  the  number  of  their 
subjects  and  swelling  their  revenues.  They  were  still  dripping 
with  the  bloody  spoils  of  the  partition  of  Poland  when  they 
turned  from  Russia  and  Austria,  their  partners  in  that  horrible 
crime,  to  traffic  with  Napoleon. 

They  were  well  satisfied  to  share  his  spoils  until  in  his  war 
with  England  he  snatched  Hanover  from  the  British  crown 
and  took  possession  of  Bremen  and  Cuxhaven.  That  step 
brought  him  to  the  frontiers  of  Prussia  and  gave  him  com- 
mand of  her  two  gateways  to  the  Atlantic. 

Divided  counsels  now  arose  among  the  Prussians.  The  weak 
and  irresolute  King  Frederick  William  III  found  himself 
pulled  and  hauled  between  French  and  anti-French  factions, 

218 


CRUSHING  PRUSSIA  219 

the  latter  having  an  ardent  and  influential  champion  in  Queen 
Louise,  whose  sweetness  and  beauty  have  been  immortalised 
by  artists. 

When  the  young  and  enthusiastic  Czar  hastened  to  Berlin 
to  urge  the  King  to  join  in  the  coalition  against  France 
in  1805,  he  found  an  enthusiastic  ally  in  the  Queen.  The 
Czar,  the  King  and  Queen  in  a  melodramatic  scene  by  lantern 
light,  vowed  over  the  tomb  of  Frederick  the  Great  never  to 
rest  until  Napoleon  was  driven  back  beyond  the  Rhine. 

In  less  than  a  month  the  Battle  of  Austerlitz  was  fought,  the 
Czar  put  to  flight  and  the  Emperor  of  Austria  brought  to  his 
knees.  It  was  now  Napoleon's  turn  to  dictate  terms.  In- 
stead of  whirling  his  triumphant  army  toward  Prussia,  how- 
ever, he  chose  to  humour  her,  and  at  the  same  time  embroil  her 
with  England  by  making  her  a  gift  of  Hanover,  which  he  had 
only  just  taken  from  her  ally,  the  English  King.  He  was 
quickly  rewarded  for  his  Greek  gift  when  he  saw  Prussia, 
instead  of  making  war  on  him,  at  war  with  England,  whose 
navy  swooped  down  upon  her  merchant  flag  and  swept  it  from 
the  seas. 

The  anti-French  faction  in  Prussia  grew  more  bitter  than 
ever  at  the  sight  of  Frederick  William  entangled  in  that  Han- 
over deal.  But  Prussian  jealousy  was  aroused  to  the  highest 
pitch  when,  in  the  summer  of  1806,  a  league  of  nearly  twenty 
of  the  southern  German  states,  Bavaria,  Wiirtemberg,  and 
Baden  chief  among  them,  sought  shelter  under  Napoleon's 
powerful  protection  and  acclaimed  him  the  overlord  of  a  third 
of  Germany.  As  the  war  party  rallied  around  Queen  Louise, 
the  timid,  halting  King  of  Prussia  was  swept  along  on  the 
current,  and  prudence  fled  the  court  of  Berlin.  What  if 
the  Grand  Army,  like  a  crouching  lion  ready  to  spring,  was 
resting  on  its  laurels  by  the  Prussian  border !  What  if  it  was 
commanded  by  the  matchless  conqueror  of  the  armies  of  Aus- 
tria and  Russia !  Napoleon  had  yet  to  meet  the  invincible 
army  of  Frederick  the  Great,  officered  by  the  heirs  of  Freder- 
ick's lieutenants,  carpet  knights  who  flattered  themselves  that 
they  had  inherited  the  martial  virtues  along  with  the  castles 
of  their  sires. 


220     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Members  of  the  noble  guard  whetted  their  blades  on  the 
stone  steps  of  the  French  Embassy  in  Berlin  and  Napoleon 
grasped  his  sword  when  he  heard  of  their  defiance:  ''The 
insolent  braggarts  shall  soon  learn  that  our  weapons  need  no 
sharpening."  Although  he  neglected  no  detail  in  his  prepa- 
rations for  war  he  could  not  believe  the  plain  signs  of  coming 
hostilities.  As  late  as  the  middle  of  September  he  said: 
''The  idea  that  Prussia  will  attack  me  single-handed  is  so 
absurd  that  it  does  not  deserve  notice."  The  two  powers 
were  most  unequally  matched.  Prussia  had  only  10,000,000 
people  against  five  times  that  number  under  Napoleon 's  sway. 

As  always  with  Napoleon's  foes,  the  Prussians  fancied  they 
could  fool  him.  The  King,  although  he  had  reopened  the 
port  of  Bremen  to  British  commerce  and  his  troops  already 
were  on  the  march,  congratulated  himself  in  a  letter  to  the 
Czar  in  the  first  week  of  September,  1806,  that  "Bonaparte 
has  left  me  at  my  ease. ' '  While  Napoleon  was  leaving  Freder- 
ick William  at  his  ease,  he  was  loading  down  the  beams  of 
light  with  semaphore  telegrams  to  his  army.  Possessing  the 
only  optical  telegraphic  system,  he  could  send  an  order  from 
Paris  to  the  Rhine  in  half  an  hour,  a  distance  that  the  post 
required  four  days  to  cover. 

At  last  in  early  October,  Prussia  delivered  her  ultimatum, 
which,  when  received,  left  Napoleon  only  one  day  to  quit 
German  soil.  Already,  however,  his  vanguard  was  across  the 
Bavarian  frontier  and  moving  toward  the  enemy. 

The  war  had  begun,  with  120,000  Prussians  and  Saxons 
moving  southwestward  toward  the  communications  of  the 
Grand  Army,  while  the  Grand  Army  itself,  190,000  strong, 
moved  northward  from  Bavaria  to  place  itself  between  the 
Allies  and  their  base.  One  fatal  difference  lay  in  the  seeming 
paradox  that  the  shorter  legged  Frenchmen  covered  more 
ground  in  a  day  than  the  longer-legged  Germans.  Where 
each  army  was  marching  to  cut  the  other's  communications  the 
one  that  cut  first  would  surely  win.  The  tradition  had  come 
down  to  the  Prussians  that  from  twelve  to  fifteen  miles  was  a 
long  enough  march  for  an  army  to  make  in  a  day.  The  French 
under    Lannes,   however,    marched   sixty -five   miles   in   fifty 


The  Conqueror,  by  Meissoxier 


His  Camp  Wasiistand   and   His   Hat 
(Xow  treasured   in  the   Museuin   of  tlie   Invalides) 


CRUSHING  PRUSSIA  221 

hours.  Bemadotte  marched  his  men  seventy-five  miles  in 
sixty-nine  hours  and  Lef ebre  's  command  made  forty-two  miles 
in  one  day. 

The  Allies  had  no  idea  where  Napoleon  was  until  suddenly 
they  were  made  painfully  aware  of  his  presence  behind  them 
on  their  lines.  Then  their  army  turned  as  involuntarily,  as 
instinctively  as  a  dog  when  caught  by  the  tail. 

An  army's  lines  of  supply  have  been  called  its  muscles; 
when  they  are  cut,  the  military  body  is  paralysed.  Paralysis 
seized  upon  the  brain  of  the  allied  army  when  its  leaders  real- 
ised that  Napoleon,  instead  of  being  in  front  of  them  was 
behind  them.  Confusion  reigned  in  their  councils  and  confi- 
dence forsook  the  conceit  of  the  aristocratic  officers.  The  com- 
missary was  demoralised  and  the  poor  soldiers,  without 
rations,  were  marched  and  countermarched  in  a  tangle  of 
contradictory  plans. 

Having  paralysed  the  head  of  the  allied  army  and  spread 
consternation  through  its  ranks,  Napoleon's  next  object  was  to 
fall  upon  the  bewildered  foe  and  annihilate  him.  AYhile  the 
Prussians  and  Saxons  were  hurriedly  falling  back  in  an  effort 
to  repair  their  communications,  he  struck  one  division  of 
them,  as  much  to  his  own  surprise  as  to  theirs,  on  a  lofty 
plateau  above  Jena, 

The  scholastic  repose  of  that  ancient  and  celebrated  univer- 
sity town  is  guarded  by  two  towering  sentinel  heights,  one  the 
Bismarkturn  and  the  other  the  Landgrafenberg,  whose  top- 
most height  is  called  the  Napoleonstein.  For  it  is  there  on 
that  brow  of  the  Landgrafenberg  that  Napoleon  pitched  his 
bivouac  in  a  waning  October  day,  and  there  in  the  dawn  of 
the  following  day  he  opened  the  famous  Battle  of  Jena. 

The  landscape  of  the  plateau  is  delightfully  German,  with 
its  old  windmills  and  its  little  poster  villages,  where  the  fann- 
ers, instead  of  dwelling  apart  on  their  acres,  gather  to  make 
their  homes  about  the  kirche  and  the  gasthof.  It  was  around 
those  tranquil  little  hamlets  that  the  strife  raged  in  greatest 
fury  as  Gaul  and  Teuton  took  and  retook  them  wliile  a  hail  of 
lead  pelted  their  walls. 

Against  the  tiny  town  of  Vierzehnheiligen  in  particular  the 


222     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

battle  tide  surged  for  a  full  half  day.  Beside  its  modest,  old 
church  to-day  there  rises  a  cross  in  memory  of  the  men  who 
were  slain  in  its  winding  lanes  and  dooryards,  and  its  tavern 
walls  are  covered  with  rusty  souvenirs  of  the  field  of  combat. 
Although  divided  by  stone  walls  into  many  thrifty  little  Ger- 
man farms,  the  size  of  the  battlefield  is  better  suited  for  golf 
links  than  for  a  mighty  combat  between  two  great  armies. 

The  larger  part  of  that  small  field  was  white  with  the  tents 
of  the  Prussians  and  Saxons  when  Napoleon  climbed  up  the 
front  of  the  Landgrafenberg,  which  rises  as  steep  as  a  roof 
from  the  valley  in  which  Jena  drowses  beside  the  River  Saale. 
He  saw  the  Allies  across  the  field,  hardly  a  mile  away,  where 
they  were  flattering  themselves  that  they  were  secure  against 
the  approach  of  the  enemy.  They  held  the  only  high  road 
from  Jena,  which  winds  about  until  it  takes  the  big  hill  in  the 
rear,  while  the  almost  perpendicular  front  of  the  hill  rose  like 
an  impregnable  breastwork  for  their  protection.  The  thought 
that  a  great  army  might  scale  it  had  not  entered  their  fears. 
Napoleon,  however,  had  not  sent  an  army  up  the  walls  of  the 
Alps  to  be  daunted  now  by  the  Landgrafenberg  and  he  or- 
dered his  columns  to  scramble  after  him  up  the  wooded  steeps. 

As  night  drew  on,  the  lights  of  the  allied  camp  blazed  forth. 
Meanwhile  over  at  the  brow  of  the  bluff,  where  a  tree  and  seat 
now  mark  the  site  of  Napoleon's  bivouac,  a  single  small  flame 
flickered  unnoticed  in  the  outer  darkness.  It  was  the  only 
light  permitted  in  the  French  camp,  and  the  Emperor  sat  by 
it  studying  his  plans  for  the  morrow. 

All  night  his  soldiers  were  toiling  up  the  stony  beds  of  the 
dry  brooks,  but  they  extinguished  their  lanterns  as  they  en- 
tered upon  the  plateau  and  joined  their  sleeping  comrades  in 
the  silent  encampment.  It  was  the  Emperor's  habit,  how- 
ever, to  sleep  little  the  night  before  a  battle.  Most  command- 
ers at  such  times  issue  their  orders  for  the  next  day  and  go  to 
bed.  Napoleon,  on  the  contrary,  took  his  rest  first  and  planned 
his  battles  after  refreshing  himself  with  sleep  and  when  he 
was  in  possession  of  the  latest  reports  to  reach  his  headquar- 
ters.    "I  lie  down  at  eight  o 'clock, ' '  he  wrote  Josephine  from 


CRUSHING  PRUSSIA  223 

the  Prussian  campaign,  "and  I  rise  at  midnight,  I  sometimes 
think  that  you  are  not  yet  abed. ' ' 

When  he  rose  at  midnight  before  the  Battle  of  Jena  and 
made  the  round  of  his  lines,  he  found  some  heavy  guns  had 
been  stalled  in  the  steep  track  up  the  height.  He  went  among 
the  baffled  officers  and  weary  soldiers.  As  they  saw  the  Em- 
peror, lantern  in  hand,  taking  charge  of  the  work,  they  were 
inspired  to  renewed  efforts  in  their  struggles  against  the  rocks 
and  trees  that  opposed  them. 

When  the  darkness  of  night  had  lifted  from  the  field,  a 
heavy  fog  remained  to  conceal  from  the  unsuspecting  enemy 
the  movements  of  the  French.  The  Allies  were  still  fast 
asleep  when,  out  of  a  thick  mist,  a  shower  of  bullets  began 
suddenly  to  rain  upon  their  tents.  Finding  that  the  fire  came 
from  their  rear  the  commanding  officers  were  satisfied  that 
the  attack  was  being  made  by  a  mere  skirmishing  party  which 
had  contrived  to  climb  the  face  of  the  hill.  It  is  a  fact  that 
the  battle  had  been  in  progress  perhaps  two  hours  before  the 
seriousness  of  the  engagement  was  appreciated. 

Napoleon's  first  object  and  need  was  to  drive  in  the  wings 
of  the  allied  forces  and  gain  a  decent  footing  on  the  little  field 
for  his  own  constantly  swelling  anny,  which  was  separated 
from  the  enemy's  lines  by  only  1200  yards.  The  precipice  of 
the  Landgrafenberg  yawned  behind  him,  and  few  commanders 
would  have  undertaken  to  open  a  great  battle  in  such  close 
quarters.  Moreover  it  was  noon  before  his  reinforcements  gave 
him  as  many  men  as  the  enemy.  It  was  only  by  the  swiftest 
marches  that  he  was  saved  from  being  badly  outnumbered,  and 
the  battle  was  won  by  the  legs  of  the  French.  If  they  had 
travelled  at  the  pace  usual  with  armies,  Jena  would  have  been  a 
defeat  instead  of  a  victory  for  Napoleon. 

Wliile  he  waited  for  his  hurrying  troops  to  climb  up  on  the 
plateau,  he  postponed  the  decisive  stroke  and  the  imperial 
guard  burned  with  Gallic  impatience  to  get  into  the  fray. 
"Forward!"  some  guardsman  in  the  ranks  shouted  at  last. 
Napoleon  turned  in  the  saddle  to  scowl  sternly  at  the  impetu- 
ous soldier. 


224    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

''How,  now!"  he  exclaimed.  "What  beardless  youth  is 
this  who  dares  to  offer  his  counsels  to  his  Emperor?  Let  him 
wait  till  he  has  commanded  in  thirty  pitched  battles  before  he 
ventures  to  give  me  advice!"  Nevertheless  he  enjoyed  the 
valiant  spirit  of  the  guardsman,  and  the  rash  youth  and  the 
Napoleonic  scowl  have  been  perpetuated  at  the  palace  of  Ver- 
sailles in  Horace  Vernet's  picture  of  the  "Battle  of  Jena." 

By  two  o'clock  there  was  fighting  enough  behind  the  garden 
walls  of  Vierzehnheiligen  for  the  most  ardent  warrior.  There 
the  rout  of  the  Allies  began.  There  the  kingdom  of  Frederick 
the  Great  was  smitten  to  earth.  At  four,  Napoleon  was  the 
master  of  the  no  longer  disputed  field,  where  the  French  ar- 
tillery, drawn  at  a  gallop  in  pursuit  of  the  fleeing  mob,  ground 
its  way  over  the  bones  of  the  dead. 

It  was  a  day  of  surprises  for  both  sides.  Napoleon  thought 
he  had  beaten  the  army  accompanied  by  the  King  until  a 
courier  arrived  to  report  that  Llarshal  Davout  had  come  upon 
that  army  under  the  command  of  the  Duke  of  Brunswick  at 
Auerstadt,  twelve  miles  from  the  battlefield  of  Jena.  It  was 
at  Auerstadt  that  the  greater  fight  was  fought,  the  greater 
victory  won  by  the  French  and  with  a  force  that  was  outnum- 
bered in  that  engagement  nearly  two  to  one. 

From  both  fields  the  Prussians  were  in  wild  flight;  the 
Duke  of  Brunswick  was  mortally  wounded ;  Prince  Hohenlohe 
was  racing  for  safety;  their  armies  were  hopelessly  smashed. 

Napoleon,  having  beaten  the  Allies  on  the  field  of  battle, 
proceeded  to  employ  the  arts  of  statesmanship  and  diplomacy 
to  divide  them  forever.  He  assembled  and  addressed  in 
friendly  terms  the  captive  Saxon  officers,  who  pledged  them- 
selves not  only  to  abandon  the  war  against  him  and  go  home, 
but  also  to  advise  their  sovereign  to  break  the  alliance  with 
Prussia. 

On  his  march  to  Berlin,  he  entered  the  green  gate  and  went 
to  bed  in  the  very  rococo  precincts  of  the  great  Frederick's 
much  Frenchified  palace  of  Sans  Souci,  which  sits  amid  its 
terraces  and  fountains  at  Potsdam.  Having  overthrown  the 
kingdom  of  Frederick  in  a  campaign  of  seven  days,  he  felt 
entitled  to  make  himself  at  home  in  the  favourite  abode  of  the 


CRUSHING  PRUSSIA  225 

hero  of  the  Seven  Years'  War.  Like  the  tourists  who  daily 
stream  through  the  green  gate,  he  visited  Voltaire 's  room,  saw 
the  chair  in  which  Frederick  passed  the  declining  days  of  his 
lean  old  age,  the  bed  on  which  he  died,  the  clock  which  he 
used  to  wind  and  whose  hands  stopped  at  the  very  minute  of 
its  master's  death. 

The  uninvited  guest  of  Sans  Souci  also  made  a  pilgrimage 
to  the  Garrison  church  in  the  town  of  Potsdam,  the  place  of 
worship  of  the  Hohenzollerns,  which  is  almost  as  plain  as  a 
New  England  meeting  house.  There  in  a  bare,  dingy  alcove 
behind  the  severely  simple  Lutheran  pulpit,  two  plain  marble 
sarcophagi  rest  on  the  floor.  One  holds  the  dust  of  Freder- 
ick's quarrelsome  father,  Frederick  William  I,  while  the  other, 
covered  with  wreaths,  holds  the  dust  of  the  illustrious  son. 

The  sword  and  sash  and  hat  of  the  mighty  warrior  lay  upon 
his  sarcophagus  when  Napoleon  visited  the  tomb  and  he 
promptly  ordered  that  they  be  sent  to  the  museum  of  the 
Hotel  des  Invalides  in  Paris.  "I  would  rather  have  these 
than  20,000,000  francs,"  was  his  very  practical  computation 
of  the  value  of  those  most  impressive — if  unworthy — trophies 
of  his  victory  over  Prussia. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND 

1807     AGE   37 

THE  sorrows  of  the  kingdom  of  Prussia  in  the  humiliat- 
ing years  that  followed  its  sudden  collapse  under  the 
blows  of  Napoleon  are  personified  to  the  sympathies 
of  posterity  by  the  beautiful  Queen  Louise. 

The  amazing  wreck  of  the  proud  kingdom  of  Frederick  the 
Great,  and  the  distressing  plight  of  the  royal  house  of  Hohen- 
zollern  are  not  easy  to  imagine.  That  awful  disaster,  the 
swiftest  and  most  complete  that  ever  befell  a  great  monarchy, 
is  best  measured  by  taking  a  journey  of  700  miles  along  the 
path  of  Louise's  flight  from  the  field  of  the  calamitous  battle 
at  Jena,  in  October,  1806,  to  the  little  stretch  of  sand  by  the 
Baltic  which  at  last  was  the  only  refuge  left  her  beneath  the 
Prussian  flag. 

First  going  to  Berlin,  whither  she  drove  in  an  open  cart, 
Louise  was  warned  by  the  commandant  of  her  capital  that  to 
escape  capture  she  must  leave  the  next  morning.  Quitting  the 
palace,  where  in  a  few  days  Napoleon  would  take  up  his  resi- 
dence and  seeking  safety  in  the  fortress  city  of  Stettin,  she  was 
to  find  no  security  even  behind  its  walls.  Its  eighty-one-year- 
old  commandant  was  quaking  with  alarm,  and  there  the  Queen 
heard  that  even  the  King,  whom  she  had  not  seen  since  they 
parted  on  the  eve  of  the  overwhelming  defeat  at  Jena,  was 
ready  to  give  up.  "For  God's  sake,"  she  implored  him  by 
messenger,  "no  shameful  peace!"  Hoping  to  brace  the  will 
of  her  spineless  husband,  she  hurried  away  to  join  him  at 
Custrin. 

An  epidemic  of  surrender  had  spread  over  the  land.  A 
paralysis  had  smitten  all  resolution  throughout  the  country. 

226 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  227 

A  contagion  of  fear  had  seized  upon  the  leaders  of  Prussia,  a 
cowardly  aristocracy,  who  were  surrendering  everything  at 
the  sight  of  a  Frenchman.  A  guard  of  500  French  had 
marched  away  from  Erfurt  with  10,000  prisoners;  Prince 
Hohenlohe  was  a  prisoner.  Before  a  mere  handful  of  Na- 
poleon's troops,  12,000  Prussians  had  laid  down  their  arms  at 
Prenzlau.  Magdeburg,  with  24,000  men,  ran  up  the  white 
flag  before  the  invader  could  mount  a  gun  in  front  of  it. 
Berlin  had  only  busied  itself  with  arranging  a  courteous  wel- 
come for  the  enemy.  In  all,  five  great  military  strongholds 
struck  their  colours  within  the  fortnight  after  the  Battle 
of  Jena. 

The  presence  of  the  resolute  Queen  at  Custrin  overbalanced 
the  majority  in  the  King's  council,  which  had  been  advising 
his  acceptance  of  Napoleon's  demands.  Frederick  William 
was  persuaded  to  rely  on  the  assistance  of  the  Czar  Alexander, 
for  had  not  Alexander  pledged  his  friendship  over  the  tomb 
of  Frederick  the  Great  only  a  year  before  ?  Napoleon  grimly 
retorted  to  Frederick  William 's  refusal  of  peace :  ' '  You  have 
taken  the  box  and  thrown  the  dice.     The  dice  shall  decide." 

The  King  and  Queen  must  now  move  on  to  the  Vistula,  the 
next  river  barrier  against  the  advancing  hosts  of  the  con- 
queror, for  soon  Custrin,  with  its  13,000  troops  and  ninety 
guns,  was  to  yield  to  a  regiment  of  French.  An  army  of  150,- 
000  Prussians  had  melted  away  in  four  weeks,  and  only  8000 
were  left  to  uphold  the  standards  of  the  kingdom. 

While  the  King  and  Queen  were  hiding  in  a  little  river 
town,  where  they  occupied  one  small  room  in  a  miserable 
wooden  house,  Napoleon  was  comfortably  at  home  in  their 
great  palace.  Dating  his  orders  from  "The  Imperial  Camp 
at  Berlin,"  he  issued  to  a  subject  world  his  celebrated  "Berlin 
Decree,"  forbidding  all  Europe  to  trade  with  England,  use 
her  products,  correspond  with  her  people  or  even  send  by  post 
any  letter  written  in  English. 

It  was  not  long  until  Frederick  William  and  Louise  in  their 
never  ending  flight  from  the  advancing  French,  had  to  put  the 
Vistula  behind  them.  Crossing  into  East  Prussia,  they  made 
their  toilsome  way  in  the  mud  to  Osterode,  more  than  three 


228  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

hundred  miles  from  Berlin  and  nearly  five  hundred  from  Jena. 
The  farther  they  went  the  greater  grew  Napoleon's  demands. 

The  war  at  the  outset  had  filled  him  with  genuine  indigna- 
tion. However  much  or  little  he  may  have  deserved  it,  he 
had  not  desired  it.  His  rage  overflowed  all  bounds  when  the 
King  declined  to  make  peace  with  him  at  Berlin  and  when  he 
saw  the  Prussian  court  inviting  "the  Tartar  barbarians,"  as 
he  called  the  Russians,  to  take  part  in  an  affair  between  civil- 
ised nations  of  the  west.  Dropping  the  comparatively  modest 
demands  he  originally  made,  he  now  insisted  on  the  Hohen- 
zollern  monarchy  giving  up  everything  from  the  Vistula  to 
the  Elbe,  a  territory  300  miles  wide  from  east  to  west  and 
including  Berlin  herself. 

Most  of  the  King's  advisers,  distrusting  the  good  faith  of 
Russia,  urged  him  to  agree  even  to  that  heavy  sacrifice.  But 
once  more  Louise 's  influence  outweighed  their  counsels.  ' '  The 
Queen  has  never  once  acted  contrary  to  her  instinct  for  hero- 
ism and  tenacity, ' '  the  Swedish  ambassador  accompanying  the 
fugitive  court  has  testified ;  * '  every  one  has  followed  her  lead 
with  enthusiasm." 

The  ambassador  correctly  named  the  quality  which  governed 
Louise  in  that  dark  crisis.  It  was  her  woman's  instinct. 
For  that  amiable  Princess  was  not  a  politician,  skilled  in  po- 
litical intrigue,  as  Napoleon  was  portraying  her  in  his  ungal- 
lant  bulletins.  Nor  was  hers  a  martial  nature  with  the  spirit 
of  an  Amazon.  She  was  only  a  simple,  loyal  woman,  born 
and  brought  up  in  the  provinces,  whose  gentle  bosom  was  agi- 
tated with  the  emotions  of  German  patriotism,  a  thing  un- 
known to  the  Prussian  royalty  and  aristocracy  as  a  whole. 

Another  powerful  instinct  animated  Louise,  the  maternal 
instinct.  For  the  Queen  was  a  good  mother,  who,  although 
only  thirty,  had  left  behind  in  her  flight  the  new-made  grave 
of  her  eighth  child.  To  her  the  kingdom  was  not  a  mere 
political  institution,  but  a  heritage  to  be  preserved  and  trans- 
mitted to  her  children,  with  whom  she  was  reunited  at  last 
when  she  took  up  her  residence  in  the  ancient  castle  at  Konigs- 
berg. 

The  royal  family  now  had  been  hunted  beyond  the  con- 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  229 

fines  of  Germany,  as  its  boundaries  were  then  defined.  For  at 
Konigsberg  they  were  in  that  Old  Prussia  or  Prussia  proper 
which  originally  was  outside  the  German  world,  although  it 
was  destined  to  give  its  name  to  the  dominant  state  in  the 
German  Empire  of  a  later  day. 

The  Queen  found  the  castle,  whose  tower  has  risen  these 
hundreds  of  years  above  the  River  Pregel  as  it  flows  through 
the  city  of  Konigsberg,  a  big,  bare  barn  of  a  place.  Only  by 
borrowing  beds  and  chairs  and  tables  from  the  wealthy  mer- 
chants of  the  town  was  it  made  habitable. 

At  last,  however,  Louise  had  her  children  around  her,  and 
that  was  sufficient  to  make  the  cheerless  castle  a  home.  Her 
oldest  boy  was  eleven,  and  he  was  to  grow  up  to  be  King 
Frederick  William  IV.  The  second  boy,  William,  was  nearly 
ten.  It  was  written  in  the  book  of  fate  that,  on  the  death  of 
the  elder  brother,  he  too  would  be  crowned  King  some  day  in 
that  very  castle  of  Konigsberg,  and  be  more  than  King — the 
first  Emperor  of  a  new  German  Empire  which  was  to  rise 
from  the  ruins  that  then  confronted  the  royal  family. 

Through  his  long  life,  William  never  forgot  the  New  Year 's 
gift,  the  uniform  of  the  Prussian  Guard,  which  he  received  at 
Konigsberg.  And  it  must  have  been  an  unforgettable  disap- 
pointment that  his  mother  could  not  see  him  on  the  parade 
ground.  For  the  weeks  of  grief  and  privation  had  made 
Louise  an  easy  prey  to  typhoid,  which  was  raging  through  the 
town  and  the  camps,  and  the  court  feared  for  her  life. 

As  a  Russian  army  prepared  to  come  to  the  relief  of  Prus- 
sia, Napoleon  advanced  to  meet  it.  The  new  campaign  opened 
on  those  luckless  plains  of  Poland,  which  in  1914,  became  the 
theatre  for  the  first  act  on  the  eastern  front  in  the  War  of  the 
Nations.  The  national  boundaries  then  were  very  different 
from  the  lines  afterward  drawn.  In  the  partition  of  the 
Polish  kingdom,  Prussia  had  taken  a  much  larger  and  Russia 
a  much  smaller  share  than  in  the  settlement  made  after  the 
fall  of  Napoleon.  The  Russian  frontier  then  ran  only  a  little 
west  of  the  city  of  Vilna,  while  the  Prussian  possessions  in- 
cluded Warsaw  and  extended  far  to  the  cast  of  that  city. 

The  strategic  points,  however,  have  not  changed  with  time 


230    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

and  were  much  the  same  in  Napoleon's  campaign  as  in  the 
War  of  the  Nations.  The  French  pressed  forward  unopposed 
and  without  pausing,  from  fortress  to  fortress,  from  the  Oder 
to  the  Vistula,  from  Thorn  and  Posen  to  Warsaw.  As  he 
went,  the  French  Emperor  freed  the  Polish  serfs  and  aroused 
the  patriot  Poles,  who  welcomed  him  as  their  deliverer  from 
the  Russian  and  Prussian  yokes. 

It  was  not  until  the  Polish  winter  had  come  that  the 
slow  moving  Russians  entered  Prussian  Poland  and  challenged 
Napoleon.  Leaving  Warsaw,  he  opened  the  hardest  campaign 
he  had  seen  since  he  emerged  from  an  Oriental  desert  and  the 
hardest  he  was  again  to  see  until  the  invasion  of  Russia  in 
1812.  The  frozen  wastes  of  northern  Poland  were  hardly  less 
barren  of  food  for  soldiers  than  the  Egyptian  sands.  Even 
when  they  could  get  bread  it  was  in  loaves  of  black  rye,  which 
the  French  could  neither  enjoy  nor  digest. 

The  peasantry,  with  nothing  to  spare  from  their  scant  pro- 
vision against  starvation  in  the  long  winter,  buried  the  little 
they  possessed  at  the  approach  of  the  army,  and  took  to  the 
woods.  Raiding  soldiers  flew  at  the  wretched,  depopulated 
villages  only  to  have  their  hunger  mocked  by  disappointment. 

A  mutinous  murmur  rose  and  spread  through  the  ranks. 
The  soldiers  had  not  seen  a  pay  day  since  the  war  began.  Not 
a  few  in  their  despair,  resorted  to  suicide.  The  victorious 
troops  of  Austerlitz,  instead  of  being  led  back  to  France  in 
triumph  and  enjoying  their  well-won  glory  by  their  firesides, 
found  themselves  after  a  year  marching  farther  and  farther 
from  home  into  the  depths  of  a  bleak  desolation,  where  they 
ploughed  through  mud  by  day  and  were  assailed  by  wintry 
blasts  at  night. 

While  no  commander  ever  excelled  Napoleon  in  his  atten- 
tion to  the  needs  of  his  troops  or  equalled  him  in  his  ability 
to  provide  for  them,  it  was,  however,  his  maxim  to  "make 
war  support  war. ' '  But  now  he  was  in  a  country  which  could 
not  support  it.  He  drained  its  resources  to  the  last  drop  and 
even  employed  80,000  captured  tents  to  make  shirts  for  the 
sick.  He  cared  nothing  for  tents  in  themselves,  holding  that 
they  were  unhealthful  and  that  it  was  "much  better  for  the 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  231 

soldier  to  bivouac  in  the  open  air,  for  there  he  can  build  a  fire 
and  sleep  with  warm  feet." 

He  had  small  sympathy  with  fault-finding  soldiers  in  that 
terrible  winter  campaign  because  he  shared  their  hardships 
and  was  thriving  on  them.  He  always  felt  better  in  the  worst 
camp  than  in  the  most  luxurious  palace.  While  living  on 
princely  fare  at  Warsaw,  he  suffered  from  violent  convulsions 
in  the  stomach  which  he  feared  were  the  symptoms  of  cancer, 
the  disease  that  caused  his  father's  death.  But  in  the  midst 
of  rigorous  campaigning,  he  wrote  to  Josephine:  "I  have 
never  been  so  well.  You  will  find  me  much  fatter."  Yet  he 
was  eating  soldiers'  rations  and  sleeping  in  foul  hovels,  where 
he  dared  not  undress.  Through  one  period  of  fourteen  days 
in  that  campaign  he  did  not  take  off  his  boots.  Marshals  of 
France  were  glad  enough  some  nights  to  lie  on  a  manure  pile 
and  enjoy  its  warmth. 

The  French  had  laboured  up  out  of  Poland  and  were  now 
in  winter  quarters  on  the  broad,  Prussian  plains,  some  fifty 
miles  to  the  south  of  Konigsberg.  On  his  own  responsibility, 
the  restless  Ney  did  indeed  threaten  that  city,  whose  gates 
were  barricaded  but  defended  by  only  a  small  force.  The 
place  was  filled  with  panic,  and  Louise,  although  still  low  with 
fever,  insisted  upon  being  moved  from  the  menaced  town.  To 
her  anxious  physician  who  was  reluctant  to  risk  the  journey, 
she  declared,  "I  would  rather  fall  by  the  hand  of  God  than 
into  the  hands  of  those  men. ' ' 

It  was  in  the  depth  of  winter,  with  a  storm  sweeping  in 
from  the  Baltic  and  beating  against  the  windows  of  the  castle, 
when  the  stricken  but  still  resolute  Queen,  lying  down  on  cot- 
ton bales  in  a  carriage,  resumed  her  long  flight  from  Napoleon 
to  the  one  refuge  left  her  in  all  her  kingdom.  This  was  the 
little  town  of  Memel  on  the  Baltic,  near  the  Russian  border, 
and  the  last  dot  on  the  map  of  Prussia. 

The  road  followed  a  narrow  strip  of  sand  that  forms  a  break- 
water between  the  Baltic  and  the  Kurisches  Haff,  which  is  a 
great  lagoon.  That  slender  strand  was  covered  with  a  forest 
a  few  years  before  and  occupied  by  many  fishing  villages. 
But  the  Prussian  kings  in  their  greed  had  latel}^  cut  down  the 


232     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

trees.  Thereupon  the  big  sand  dunes,  often  rising  to  a  height 
of  200  feet  and  more,  began  to  shift,  overwhelming 
and  burying  the  villages,  until  this  strange  tongue  of  land  was 
left  virtually  depopulated.  Those  dunes  are  on  their  travels 
to  this  day  along  that  desolate  shore,  the  celebrated  amber 
coast  of  the  Baltic. 

For  three  January  days  and  for  nearly  ninety  miles  Louise 
was  driven  over  that  wild  and  dreary  track  in  snow  and  sleet, 
with  the  waves  of  the  Baltic  often  threatening  to  engulf  her 
coach.  One  night  she  had  to  sleep  in  a  wretched  tumble-down 
inn,  through  whose  broken  window  panes  the  snow  blew  in 
upon  her  bed.  Her  physician,  who  had  followed  her  all  the 
way  from  Berlin,  looking  back  with  horror  on  that  experience, 
sighed,  ''Never  did  a  Queen  know  such  want."  Arrived  at 
Memel,  where  no  provision  had  been  made  for  her,  she  was 
lifted  in  the  arms  of  a  servant  and  carried  into  the  house  of 
the  Danish  consul. 

A  Prussian  corps  having  been  pieced  together  out  of  the 
widely  strewn  fragments  of  the  broken  army  and  joining  in 
the  Russian  operations,  the  Russian  General  Bennigsen  deter- 
mined to  steal  around  Napoleon.  At  the  first  sign  of  Bennig- 
sen's  activity,  however,  the  Emperor  started  to  creep  out  of 
his  hibernation  and  throw  himself  upon  the  enemy's  centre. 
Here  again,  the  campaign  was  in  a  field  which  after  more  than 
a  century  was  recalled  to  the  attention  of  the  reading  world 
by  the  operations  of  the  armies  in  the  War  of  the  Nations. 
Four  times  Napoleon  faced  the  Russians  and  squared  off  to 
deal  his  blow,  and  four  times  they  stole  away  in  the  night. 
For  ten  days  the  man  hunt  went  on  like  a  game  of  blind  man 's 
buflf  over  the  fields  of  Old  Prussia,  as  level  as  the  prairies  of 
Illinois. 

Everywhere  the  hosts  of  Napoleon  and  the  Czar  went, 
they  left  a  wake  of  misery  more  terrible  than  their  own.  The 
fruits  of  generations  of  toil  were  swept  away  as  if  by  a  con- 
flagration. Not  a  cow  or  a  pig,  a  handful  of  grain,  a  potato, 
a  copper  coin,  hardly  a  shred  of  clothing  was  spared  and  the 
peasantry  abandoned  to  a  long  winter  of  hunger  and  cold,  died 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  233 

at  a  rate  five,  six,  and  ten  times  greater  than  the  normal  mor- 
tality. 

Out  of  the  theatre  of  that  war  of  hideous  memory  there  rises 
the  stone  church  tower  of  Preuss  Eylau,  so  named  to  distin- 
guish it  from  the  Eylaus  and  Deutsch  Eylaus  of  Germany 
proper.  From  that  tower  one  looks  upon  a  village  of  half  a 
dozen  streets  almost  as  silent  as  the  churchyard  itself,  where 
in  their  narrow  cells  the  rude  forefathers  of  the  hamlet  slept 
their  untroubled  sleep  while  the  soldiers  of  many  distant  na- 
tions fought  over  their  graves. 

It  was  after  a  chase  of  many  days  when  Napoleon  alighted 
in  a  February  afternoon  of  1807  by  a  tree  on  a  hill  across  the 
now  flower-studded  meadows — the  hill  and  a  lone  tree  standing 
on  it  continue  to  bear  his  name.  Surveying  the  scene  from  the 
hill,  he  saw  the  Russians  posted  in  the  village,  and  at  once  he 
flew  at  them.  The  first  wave  of  that  horrible  Battle  of  Eylau 
surged  against  the  churchyard  wall  at  the  edge  of  the  little 
town  and  crimsoned  its  headstones.  Flowing  onward  into  the 
town,  it  broke  over  the  wide  stony  market  place  and  there  in 
front  of  the  dirty  village  tavern,  the  cannon  of  France  and 
Russia,  racing  over  the  bodies  of  the  dead,  belched  at  one 
another  with  their  muzzles  only  fifty  paces  apart. 

Tartar  and  Gaul,  French  and  Cossack,  hunted  each  other 
like  rats  from  house  to  house  and  fought  in  hand-to-hand 
combat  for  the  possession  of  the  poor  little  town.  The  French 
took  it  at  sunset,  the  Russians  retook  it  in  the  evening  dusk, 
but  only  to  drop  it  in  thirty  minutes  and  retire  into  the  black 
countryside,  where  they  slept  without  a  fire  to  warm  their  feet 
lest  their  lurking  place  might  be  disclosed. 

Napoleon,  thereupon,  recaptured  Eylau  without  striking  a 
flint,  and  selected  the  largest  house  in  town  as  a  substitute 
for  the  Tuileries.  The  place  to-day  is  an  untidy  tenement, 
and  feather-beds  and  all  manner  of  rubbish  clutter  what 
was  once  the  imperial  salon.  At  daybreak,  Russian  can- 
non in  hiding  on  the  snowy  fields  back  of  the  town  sounded 
his  reveille  from  their  500  brazen  throats,  their  shells  suddenly 
crashing  upon  Eylau  and  setting  the  villagers  shrieking.     He 


234    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

hastened  to  the  church,  climbed  to  the  belfry  and  traced  out 
through  the  grey  dawn  the  enemy 's  lines. 

The  enemy,  after  all,  had  not  stolen  away  again  under  cover 
of  darkness,  and  the  real  Battle  of  Eylau  was  on  in  full  fury, 
with  75,000  men  on  either  side.  While  the  Russians  were  try- 
ing to  pound  their  way  around  the  French  left.  Napoleon  at- 
tempted to  turn  their  own  left  and,  getting  in  behind  them, 
cut  them  off.  But  a  fine  snow  blew  in  on  icy  blasts  from  the 
north  and  at  times  the  soldiers  could  not  see  twenty  feet  ahead, 
while  the  melting  snow  so  moistened  the  primings  as  to  render 
many  of  their  muskets  useless. 

At  the  height  of  the  blinding  storm.  Napoleon  ordered  in 
Marshal  Augureau's  corps,  with  instructions  to  seize  a  hill  out 
of  the  town,  where  in  these  days  a  battle  monument  rises  among 
the  tall  pines.  Although  ill  with  fever  and  tortured  by  rheu- 
matism, the  marshal,  unable  to  resist  the  sound  of  strife,  was 
borne  on  a  sledge  to  the  battle  line.  There  he  was  lifted  to  the 
back  of  his  horse  and,  strapped  in  the  saddle,  he  dashed  for- 
ward in  a  furious  snow  squall.  Suddenly  the  snow  ceased  to 
fall,  and  Augureau's  15,000  men  found  themselves  eighty 
paces  from  a  great  Russian  battery,  which  swept  them  with 
dense  sheets  of  case  shot.  At  the  same  time  Russian  infantry 
were  raking  them  on  one  side  and  yelling  Cossacks  charging 
them  on  the  other.  Yet  the  15,000  rushed  upon  the  cannon 
and  broke  the  artillery  line,  only  to  be  overwhelmed  at  last  by 
a  swarm  of  Cossacks  who  galloped  from  their  hiding  place  be- 
hind the  hill. 

In  twenty  minutes  the  corps  of  Augureau  was  gone  from 
the  list  of  the  Grand  Army.  It  had  been  shot  to  pieces  under 
the  eyes  of  Napoleon,  as  he  watched  from  the  churchyard.  At 
evening  roll  call  only  3000  of  the  15,000  stood  to  be  counted. 

The  Cossacks  raced  over  their  fallen  foes,  galloped  up  the 
churchyard  knoll  and  plunged  among  the  graves.  "Save  the 
Emperor!"  rose  the  cry,  and  Marshal  Berthier  loudly  called 
for  the  imperial  horses.  But  the  Emperor  silenced  him  with 
a  glance  and,  without  moving  a  foot,  simply  exclaimed,  ''What 
audacity ! ' '     The  invaders  of  his  august  presence  already  had 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  235 

exhausted  themselves  in  their  daring  charge  and  were  easily 
brushed  back  by  the  cavalry  of  the  Guard. 

Murat's  cavalry  with  their  12,000  sabres  now  flung  them- 
selves at  the  enemy 's  centre,  while  Davout  pushed  around  the 
left  of  the  Russians.  The  French  seemed  to  have  retrieved 
their  mishaps,  and  at  four  o'clock  they  were  apparently  the 
victors.  They  were  in  the  Russian  rear  and  the  battle  was 
believed  to  be  over.  But  as  the  sun  was  setting,  the  head  of 
a  Prussian  column,  which  had  been  hurrying  all  day  through 
the  deep  snow,  rushed  into  a  grove  of  birch  trees.  There  it 
fell  upon  the  vanguard  of  the  French  flanking  force  and  drove 
it  back  foot  by  foot  until  the  Russian  rear  was  clear  again. 
The  army  of  the  Czar  had  been  saved  by  the  Prussians. 

For  the  first  time  in  ten  years,  Napoleon  was  obliged  to  ac- 
cept a  drawn  battle.  In  the  trampled,  blood-stained  snow, 
10,000  men  lay  dead  and  30,000  more  lay  wounded  among  the 
thousands  of  dead  horses,  a  frightful  sacrifice  without  a  gain. 
"The  country  is  strewn  with  the  dead  and  wounded,"  Na- 
poleon wrote  to  Josephine,  in  a  tone  of  lamentation  as  he  sat 
in  the  salon  of  the  present-day  squalid  tenement  house  of 
Eylau. 

The  French  survivors  passed  the  night  in  robbing  their  own 
and  the  Russian  dead  and  dying.  They  stole  from  the  sur- 
geons while  they  were  absorbed  in  their  humane  tasks.  They 
rifled  the  pockets  of  the  lifeless  and  the  helpless  living.  They 
ripped  off  the  gold  braid  and  jerked  off  the  boots  from  stricken 
officers.  They  tore  open  coffins  and  graves.  Emerson  says 
that  half  of  Napoleon's  soldiers  at  Eylau  were  thieves  and 
burglars.  At  any  rate,  a  season  of  privation  had  brutalised 
the  army  and  left  its  better  nature  winter-killed. 

Wlien  morning  came  only  the  Cossacks  remained  before  the 
town  to  guard  the  retreat  of  the  Russian  army  to  Konigsberg. 
To  have  balked  and  escaped  the  Great  Captain  was  victory 
enough  for  the  foe,  and  the  Russians  and  Prussians  were  filled 
with  rejoicing  as  they  marched  away  from  the  bloody  scene. 

The  King  of  Prussia  unhesitatingly  rejected  the  more  liberal 
terms  which  Napoleon  now  offered.     Sniffing  victory   from 


236  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

afar,  the  young  Czar  came  on  from  Petrograd  to  visit  the 
King  and  Louise  in  their  retreat  at  MemeL  That  town,  whose 
one  street  faces  the  sea,  thrilled  with  added  pride  in  the  pres- 
ence of  an  imperial  personage  as  well  as  of  royal  guests. 

As  Alexander  embraced  Frederick  William,  he  declared, 
"We  shall  never  fall  singly;  we  fall  together  or  not  at  all." 
And  the  two  monarchs  registered  a  vow  that  neither  would 
make  peace  until  Napoleon  had  been  driven  beyond  the  Rhine, 
which  is  a  march  of  800  miles ! 

With  the  coming  of  spring  the  war  was  renewed.  Napoleon 
had  built  up  his  army  to  a  total  strength  of  175,000  men,  for 
he  had  a  wide  front  to  cover.  Facing  him  were  120,000  Rus- 
sians and  Prussians.  Having  rested  and  found  food,  both 
armies  were  in  far  better  spirits  than  when  they  dragged  them- 
selves to  slaughter  at  Eylau. 

A  French  force,  under  Marshal  Lefebre,  captured  the 
fortress  city  of  Dantzic  in  ]\Iay.  In  early  June,  the  main 
bodies  of  the  two  armies  came  into  a  frightful  collision  at 
Heilsberg.  But  the  decisive  battle  in  this  second  campaign 
occurred  on  a  hot  day  of  June  at  Friedland,  only  a  few  miles 
across  the  country  from  Eylau  and  a  little  more  than  thirty 
miles  from  Konigsberg.  The  pretty  village  of  Friedland,  with 
its  shady  streets  and  well  tended  gardens,  is  one  of  the  most 
awkward  battlefields  that  the  chances  of  war  ever  chose, 
perched  as  it  is  on  a  bluff  and  hemmed  in  between  the  River 
Alle  on  one  side  and  a  creek  on  the  other. 

With  his  back  to  the  200-foot  river,  Bennigsen  was  pressing 
hard  Marshal  Lannes'  small  force  when,  at  noon.  Napoleon 
rode  upon  the  scene  and  quickly  saw  that  he  could  catch  the 
Russians  in  the  tight  little  town.  He  reflected  that  it  was  the 
anniversary  of  Marengo  and  a  lucky  day  for  him.  Sitting 
down  in  a  grove  on  a  baronial  estate  at  the  edge  of  Friedland, 
where  the  present  baron  displays  the  site  of  Napoleon's 
kitchen  and  some  cannon  balls  that  fell  among  the  trees,  he 
scheduled  his  nicely  laid  plans  for  trapping  the  Russian  bear. 
The  baron  recounts,  too,  the  story  of  a  gentle  rebuke  the  Em- 
peror gave  a  young  officer  who  dodged  as  one  of  the  balls 
whistled  over  his  head.     "My  friend,"  the  great  fatalist  said 


EYLAU  AND  FRIEDLAND  237 

to  the  youth,  ''if  that  ball  were  destined  for  you,  it  would  be 
certain  to  find  you  though  you  were  to  burrow  100  feet  under 
the  ground." 

As  the  French  reinforcements  hurried  up,  Bennigsen  tried 
to  escape  by  crossing  the  river.  But  the  fire  had  grown  so  hot 
in  his  rear  that  he  had  to  turn  and  accept  battle  in  earnest 
at  five  o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  when  60,000  soldiers  of  the 
Czar  began  to  wrestle  with  80,000  troops  of  Napoleon,  with  a 
village  for  the  prize.  Soon  60,000  men  were  fighting  in  a  line 
only  the  length  of  three  city  blocks. 

Ney  hurled  his  force  through  the  first  and  second  Russian 
line,  only  to  be  driven  back  by  the  Czar 's  imperial  guard,  when 
Victor  pressed  through  the  retreating  ranks  and  smashed  the 
winded  Russians.  For  that  feat  Napoleon  promptly  rewarded 
his  old  Toulon  comrade  with  a  marshal's  baton. 

Friedland  was  now  in  flames  from  French  shells,  but  the 
Russians,  with  Slavic  stolidity,  fought  on  amid  the  burning 
buildings  until  darkness  fell.  By  that  time,  Bennigsen  had 
withdrawn  to  the  opposite  side  of  the  Alle  as  much  of  his 
army  as  he  could  save.  He  left  behind,  however,  20,000  dead, 
wounded  and  captives,  while  other  thousands  flung  themselves 
into  the  river. 

Sending  a  force  to  take  Konigsberg,  Napoleon  followed  the 
broken  army  of  Bennigsen  until  he  had  driven  it  across  the 
Niemen,  by  whose  banks  he  sat  down  at  Tilsit  to  await  the  sur- 
render of  the  Czar. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

AT  TILSIT 

1807     AGE  37 

THE  sword  of  Napoleon,  having  in  nine  months  cut  its 
way  like  a  scythe  from  end  to  end  of  Germany,  his 
allied  foes  hoisted  the  white  flag  in  the  month  of  June, 
1807.  To  signalise  the  submission  of  the  Czar,  the  conqueror 
carefully  dressed  the  stage  at  Tilsit,  and  a  rude,  far  away,  little 
town  of  10,000  people,  lying  a  few  miles  upstream  from  the 
bleak  shores  of  the  Baltic,  thus  became  the  scene  of  the  most 
celebrated  and  dramatic  meeting  of  monarchs  since  the  royal 
interview  on  the  Field  of  the  Cloth  of  Gold. 

Tilsit  is  approached  from  the  west  over  a  plain  of  steadily 
thinning  soil  and  population,  where  solemn  storks  and  lonely 
windmills  make  the  landscape  all  the  more  drear.  Farms  and 
grain  fields  give  way  to  cattle  ranges  and  hay  fields,  and  these 
seem  about  to  surrender  at  last  to  scrub  forests  and  sandy 
wastes,  when  there  rise  against  the  grey  sky  the  smoking  fac- 
tory chimneys  of  the  town,  where  once  the  Caesar  of  the  west 
and  the  Casar  of  the  east  divided  the  earth  between  them, 
while  the  King  and  Queen  of  Prussia  stood  by  to  pick  up  the 
crumbs. 

However  crude  a  stage  setting  the  Tilsit  of  100  years  ago 
may  have  been  for  the  gilded  staffs  of  two  empires,  the  Tilsit 
of  to-day  is  not  an  unworthy  background  for  the  historical  pic- 
ture. With  40,000  population,  with  avenues  as  broad  and 
leafy,  as  well  paved  and  well  swept  as  any  Parisian  should 
expect,  with  shady  squares  and  pretty  parks,  in  one  of  which 
stands  a  statue  of  Queen  Louise;  with  trolley  cars  and  taxi- 
cabs,  the  town  wears  a  worldly  air  becoming  its  celebrity. 
The  Niemen,  across  which  the  cheers  of  the  armies  of  Napoleon 
and  the  Czar  rolled  in  fraternal  greeting,  flows  by  in  imposing 

238 


AT  TILSIT  239 

breadth,  rafts  of  logs  floating  now  where  a  century  ago  the 
autocrat  of  all  the  Russias  met  and  folded  in  his  arms  the  son 
of  the  Revolution.  Beyond  the  river,  spanned  by  two  great 
modern  bridges,  one  of  them  dedicated  to  the  memory  of 
Louise,  the  visitor  looks  to  where  the  eastern  horizon,  twelve 
miles  away,  bends  to  the  desolate  boundary  of  Russia,  that  land 
of  gloom  and  mystery. 

The  spacious  three-story  stone  house,  which  was  Napoleon's 
palace  and  the  seat  of  imperial  power  for  two  weeks,  stands 
upon  one  of  the  principal  streets.  Within  it  the  business  of  a 
doctor,  a  paper  hanger  and  a  dealer  in  picture  post  cards  has 
succeeded  to  the  business  of  empire.  But  the  urns  above  its 
cornice  remain  to  assert  its  former  pretensions,  and  its  door- 
step, by  which  Napoleon  forever  holds  the  hand  of  Queen 
Louise  in  the  familiar  picture,  still  abuts  upon  the  sidewalk. 

The  Czar's  house,  where  he  dwelt  a  near-by  neighbour  of 
the  French  Emperor  on  the  same  Deutschestrasse,  has  given 
way  to  a  modem  building.  But  Louise's  house  stands  almost 
unchanged  a  few  squares  away  in  a  humbler  quarter  of  the 
town,  befitting  her  unhappy  role  in  the  drama  of  Tilsit.  It 
was  and  still  is  the  miller's  house,  with  a  grist  mill  next  door. 
But  did  not  even  Frederick  the  Great  have  to  put  up  with  a 
mill  at  the  gate  of  Sans  Souci? 

Over  the  door  of  the  house  of  the  miller  of  Tilsit  is  a  bust 
of  Louise,  and  on  the  outer  wall  a  memorial  tablet.  In  the 
front  room,  one  flight  up,  is  her  parlour,  where  her  first  fenc- 
ing match  with  the  conqueror  of  her  kingdom  took  place.  A 
marble  bust  of  her  in  a  corner  commemorates  now  that  most 
anxious  hour  in  a  period  crowded  with  anxious  hours. 

Although  Tilsit  is  off  the  tourist  path,  that  old  white  house 
by  the  mill  is  the  shrine  of  such  German  patriots  as  visit  the 
town.  In  this  refuge  of  his  stout-hearted  great-grandmother 
from  the  disasters  that  for  a  time  overwhelmed  the  Hohen- 
zollerns,  Kaiser  AVilliam  II  has  sat  in  silent  revery. 

But  the  house  of  Napoleon  is  not  the  goal  of  pilgrims.  It 
bears  no  tablet,  and  its  site  is  not  even  indicated  on  the  map 
of  the  local  guide  book. 

With  the  French  army  encamped  on  the  Tilsit  shore  of  the 


240  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Niemen  and  the  Czar's  on  the  opposite  side,  Napoleon  ordered 
an  imperial  pavilion  to  be  erected  on  a  raft,  and  this  strange 
structure  was  moored  midstream,  with  the  French  and  Rus- 
sian pennants  flying  above  it. 

On  the  eleventh  day  after  the  rout  at  Friedland,  the  armies 
of  France  and  Russia  were  drawn  up  on  their  respective  shores, 
when,  at  one  o'clock,  the  two  Emperors  appeared  on  either 
bank  and  entered  gaily  decorated  barges,  Frederick  William 
standing  forlorn  in  the  crowd  of  spectators  that  lined  the  Rus- 
sian shore.  Napoleon  had  not  invited  the  King,  whom  he  had 
scornfully  described  as  "no  more  than  an  aide-de-camp"  of 
the  Czar,  and  whom  he  despised  for  his  incompetency  in  the 
conduct  of  a  war  he  had  rashly  precipitated. 

The  Emperors  having  arrived  at  the  raft,  stepped  upon  the 
deck  of  the  pavilion  simultaneously,  when  Alexander,  in  the 
view  of  the  legions  of  two  empires,  bestowed  a  fraternal  kiss 
on  the  man  whom  he  had  ever  before  refused  to  salute  as  a 
brother  monarch.  "I  hate  the  English  as  much  as  you  do," 
he  exclaimed,  according  to  a  French  report,  ' '  and  I  will  second 
you  in  all  your  actions  against  them. ' ' 

"In  that  case,"  Napoleon  replied,  "everything  can  be  ar- 
ranged and  peace  is  already  made." 

Leaving  their  attendants  outside,  the  Emperors  then  en- 
tered the  pavilion,  where  the  two  childless  monarchs  sat  alone 
for  an  hour  and  three  quarters  while  they  partitioned  the 
world  between  themselves,  for  Asia  as  well  as  Europe  seemed 
then  to  be  a  melon  ripe  for  cutting.  Happily  neither  pos- 
sessed anything  that  the  other  coveted,  their  boundaries  lying 
far  apart,  and  the  Russians  always  being  more  greedy  for  con- 
quests in  the  east  than  in  the  west,  Napoleon  craftily  diverted 
Alexander's  attention  and  ambition  from  Europe.  Seizing 
upon  the  timely  news  that  a  revolution  had  lately  taken  place 
in  Turkey,  he  assured  the  Czar  it  was  a  decree  of  Providence 
that  the  Turkish  Empire  could  no  longer  exist. 

As  always,  however,  when  nations  sit  down  to  feast  on 
Turkey,  the  two  Emperors  could  not  agree  which  should  have 
the  Constantinople  slice.  "I  could  have  shared  the  Turkish 
Empire  with  Russia,"  Napoleon  said  in  after  years,  "but  Con- 


The  Emperor  of  thk  West  and  tiii:  JLmperor  of  the  East  Meeting 
ox  THE  Raft  at  Tilsit 


Xai'oleo.n  Greeting  Quee.x  Loiise  of  Prl:ssl\ 


AT  TILSIT  241 

stantinople  always  saved  it.  Russia  wanted  it  and  I  would  not 
grant  it.     Whoever  holds  it  can  govern  the  world." 

When  the  Emperors  came  out  of  the  pavilion,  the  Czar,  an 
impressionable,  almost  hysterical  young  man,  had  completely 
passed  under  the  magic  of  Napoleon.  "I  never,"  he  said, 
"had  more  prejudices  against  any  one  than  against  him,  but 
they  have  all  disappeared  like  a  dream.  Would  that  I  had 
met  him  earlier ! ' ' 

While  the  two  Emperors  continued  fondly  to  caress  each 
other,  Frederick  William  remained  a  silent  and  lugubrious 
looker-on  at  the  festivities,  which  included  grand  military  re- 
views and  dinners  of  Parisian  excellence  on  gold  plate  brought 
from  the  Tuileries.  No  menials  served  the  feast,  but  officers 
of  the  imperial  household  were  the  waiters,  swords  at  their 
sides  and  every  seam  gold-laced,  with  Grand  Marshal  Duroc 
standing  in  the  attitude  of  a  headwaiter. 

Napoleon  parried  every  attempt  of  the  Czar  to  return  the 
dinners,  because,  it  is  said,  he  was  unwilling  to  run  the  risk  of 
being  poisoned.  There  is  a  tale  of  his  holding  a  cup  of  tea  in 
his  hand  throughout  a  call  on  Alexander  and  never  venturing 
to  taste  it. 

Sometimes  he  rained  all  manner  of  questions  upon  his  guests. 
Once  his  eye  surveyed  the  long  row  of  buttons  on  the  side  of 
Frederick  William's  grey  pantaloons,  a  garment  that  was  only 
then  coming  into  use.  "Are  you  obliged  to  button  all  those 
buttons  every  day?"  he  asked  the  King.  "Do  3'ou  begin  at 
the  top  or  bottom?"  Again  he  would  turn  upon  the  Czar 
and  overwhelm  him  with  questions  he  could  not  answer: 
"How  much  does  the  sugar  duty  bring  you?"  "What  does 
your  sale  of  pelts  and  furs  amount  to  in  a  year ? "  "Do  you 
make  money  or  lose  money  on  this  or  that  feature  of  your  ad- 
ministration ? "  Such  a  catechism  was  likely  to  embarrass  a 
man  born  to  rule,  and  who  had  not  been  obliged,  like  the 
French  Emperor,  really  to  learn  the  trade.  In  other  moods 
he  turned  monologist,  and  moved  the  listening  monarclis  to 
admiration  and  wonder  by  the  seemingly  boundless  range  and 
depth  of  his  knowledge  of  the  commerce  in  the  many  countries 
gathered  in  his  empire. 


242     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

It  was  after  the  conference  at  Tilsit  had  been  in  progress 
more  than  a  week  when  Louise  finally  was  persuaded,  ' '  amid  a 
thousand  tears,"  her  physician  tells  us,  to  make  her  appear- 
ance there.  "God  knows  what  a  struggle  this  has  cost  me," 
she  confided  to  her  diary,  ' '  Yet  this  hard  thing  is  required  of 
me,  and  I  have  grown  used  to  sacrificing  myself," 

Arriving  from  Memel  at  four  in  the  afternoon,  she  awaited 
the  painful  ceremony  of  Napoleon's  call  at  the  miller's  house. 
"If  he  will  give  me  back  a  village  or  two,  my  errand  will  not 
have  been  in  vain,"  she  said  to  her  court. 

One  of  the  ladies  in  waiting  who  received  Napoleon  at  the 
door  has  drawn  with  ill-concealed  prejudice  an  unflattering 
portrait  of  him:  "Excessively  ugly,  with  a  fat,  swollen,  sal- 
low face ;  very  corpulent,  being  short  and  entirely  without 
figure;  his  great  eyes  roll  gloomily  around;  the  expression  of 
his  features  is  severe  and  he  looks  the  incarnation  of  fate ;  only 
his  mouth  is  well  shaped  and  his  teeth  are  good,"  The  lady 
did  admit  that  "he  was  extremely  polite,"  and  Louise  herself 
has  said  that  he  wore  the  "head  of  Cgesar," 

Bravely  putting  on  her  most  winsome  manner,  the  Queen 
took  the  hand  of  her  pursuer  and  led  him  to  a  window  in  the 
parlour,  where  they  stood  and  talked  for  an  hour.  In  the 
course  of  the  inevitable  conventionalities,  which  ranged  from 
literature  to  botany,  she  asked  him  how  he  liked  the  northerly 
climate  of  East  Prussia  and  he  answered,  "The  French  sol- 
dier, madame,  is  seasoned  to  all  climates."  Then  in  his  most 
soothing  tones  he  asked,  ' '  How  could  you  think  of  making  war 
on  me  ? "  Louise  happily  fashioned  her  reply  to  remind  him 
that  Prussia  had  not  always  been  unequal  to  France :  * '  Sire, 
we  may  be  pardoned  for  having  built  upon  the  fame  of  Freder- 
ick the  Great!" 

Approaching  her  real  mission,  the  Queen  said :  ' '  Sire,  I  am 
a  wife  and  mother,  and  it  is  by  those  titles  I  claim  your  inter- 
vention on  behalf  of  Prussia,  The  King  attaches  more  impor- 
tance to  the  province  of  Magdeburg  than  to  any  other  on  the 
left  bank  of  the  Elbe  which  your  Imperial  Majesty  takes  from 
him.  I  appeal  to  your  generous  heart;  it  is  from  it  that  I  ask 
and  expect  a  happy  issue." 


AT  TILSIT  243 

"Madame,  I  shall  certainly  be  very  happy — ^but,"  and  he 
east  an  admiring  glance  at  her,  "you  are  wearing  a  superb 
dress !    "Where  was  it  made  ? ' ' 

"In  Prussia,  Sire." 

"At  Breslau?  At  Berlin?  Do  they  make  crepe  in  your 
factories  too?" 

"No,  Sire,  but,"  the  Queen  persisted  in  returning  to  the 
main  subject,  "Your  Majesty  does  not  say  a  word  of  the  inter- 
ests that  alone  occupy  my  thoughts  at  the  present  moment, 
when  I  am  hoping  to  win  from  you  a  happier  existence  for  all 
who  are  dear  to  me.  Are  we  to  talk  about  fashions  at  such  a 
time?  Your  Imperial  Majesty's  heart  is  too  noble;  it  unites 
with  other  qualities  too  exalted  a  character  to  be  insensible  to 
my  sufferings." 

While  Louise  was  in  the  midst  of  her  appeal  to  his  sense  of 
justice,  to  his  emotions  of  mercy,  to  his  conscience,  and  just 
as  her  anxious  eyes  were  detecting  some  signs  of  relenting  in 
Napoleon's  countenance,  her  long-faced  husband  entered  the 
room,  darkening  it  with  his  cold  and  silent  melancholy. 

' '  The  King  came  in  the  nick  of  time, ' '  Napoleon  laughingly 
assured  the  Czar  when  they  next  met.  "If  he  had  stayed 
away  half  an  hour  longer  I  fear  I  should  have  found  myself 
promising  the  Queen  anything."  But  under  cover  of  his  greet- 
ing to  Frederick  William  he  made  his  adieux  to  Louise — and 
escaped  with  Magdeburg ! 

"When  she  came  to  dine  with  him  in  the  evening  he  went  out 
upon  the  sidewalk  to  welcome  her  and  escort  her  into  his  house. 
He  was  equally  polite  at  the  table  and  most  flattering  in  his 
attentions  to  his  guest,  the  one  woman  in  the  company.  After 
he  had  led  her  out  to  her  carriage  and  bade  her  good  night, 
he  said  to  the  Czar,  "The  Queen  is  a  charming  woman,  whose 
soul  matches  her  face.  Instead  of  robbing  her  of  a  crown,  I 
might  be  tempted  to  lay  one  at  her  feet."  While  Alexander 
was  hastening  to  congratulate  the  Queen  on  her  conquest,  how- 
ever. Napoleon  was  saying  to  Talleyrand,  "Magdeburg  is 
worth  a  dozen  Queens  of  Prussia!" 

After  his  experience  with  them,  Napoleon  did  not  trust 
Frederick  "William  and  his  court.     They  had  been  running 


244  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

with  the  hare  and  hunting  with  the  hounds  for  ten  or  twelve 
years.  First  when  he  was  Consul  they  had  joined  him  in 
despoiling  Austria,  and  next  they  made  ready  to  jump  on  his 
back  while  he  was  facing  Austria  and  Russia  at  Austerlitz. 
The  moment  he  was  victorious  there,  they  sacrificed  their  sworn 
allies  and  began  to  barter  with  him  again,  but  only  to  turn 
upon  him  once  more.  He  had  been  vainly  proffering  them 
terms  of  peace  throughout  the  campaign  of  1806-07,  but  they 
rejected  his  advances  and  threw  themselves  into  the  arms  of 
the  Czar,  thus  bringing  on  a  terrible  winter  campaign  that 
took  him  1000  miles  from  his  capital. 

It  was  a  maxim  of  Frederick  the  Great,  ' '  Never  maltreat  an 
enemy  by  halves."  Now  that  Napoleon  had  Prussia  down  he 
dared  not  let  her  up.  He  sternly  informed  the  King  the  day 
after  the  interviews  with  Louise :  "  I  do  not  mean  that  Prus- 
sia shall  again  be  a  power  to  weigh  in  the  political  balance  of 
Europe."  Frederick  William  grew  red  of  face  and  Napoleon 
livid,  in  the  course  of  the  stormy  talk  that  lasted  three  hours. 

That  black  day  for  Prussia  ended  with  another  dinner  at  the 
house  of  the  French  Emperor.  It  was  a  solemn  feast,  with 
the  Queen  sunk  in  grief,  the  King  still  flushed,  Napoleon  full 
of  anger,  and  Alexander  vainly  trying  to  smooth  the  troubled 
waters.  All  alike  avoided  the  one  subject  of  their  thoughts, 
the  dismemberment  of  the  kingdom  of  Frederick  the  Great. 
Only  as  the  Queen  was  leaving  did  she  venture  to  refer  to  the 
matter.  "Sire,"  she  said,  "after  the  conversation  we  had  to- 
gether yesterday,  after  all  the  kind  things  Your  ]\Iajesty  said 
to  me,  I  left  you  believing  I  was  to  owe  you  our  happiness,  the 
happiness  of  my  country  and  my  children.  To-day  all  my 
hopes  are  gone,  and  it  is  with  very  different  feelings  I  take  my 
departure." 

By  the  treaties  of  Tilsit,  (he  Czar  pledged  himself  to  offer 
his  mediation  to  England  with  a  view  to  inducing  her  to  recog- 
nise the  equality  of  all  flags  at  sea.  His  efforts  for  peace  fail- 
ing, he  promised  to  become  the  ally  of  Napoleon  in  coercing 
Sweden,  Denmark,  and  Portugal  to  close  their  harbours  against 
England  and  thus  leave  not  a  port  for  a  British  ship  on  the 
coasts  of  continental  Europe. 


AT  TILSIT  245 

With  the  easy  sense  of  honour  characteristic  of  princes, 
Alexander  accepted  in  return  a  miserable  little  strip  of  Polish 
soil  that  Napoleon  had  taken  from  Alexander's  sworn  friend, 
Frederick  William,  whom  the  Czar  really  had  seduced  into  con- 
tinuing a  disastrous  war  after  the  fall  of  Berlin.  He  received 
also  a  vague  but  glittering  permission  to  steal  Finland  from  the 
Swedes  and  European  Turkey  from  the  Sultan — with  the  ex- 
ception of  Constantinople ! 

Merely  as  "a  testimonial  of  respect"  for  the  Czar,  Napoleon 
restored  to  Prussia  half  of  her  10,000,000  subjects.  Prussian 
Poland  was  formed  into  the  Grand  Duchy  of  AVarsaw  under 
the  sovereignty  of  the  King  of  Saxony,  whose  alliance  Na- 
poleon had  won  after  the  Battle  of  Jena.  The  great  Prussian 
fortress  of  IVIagdeburg  and  all  the  rest  of  the  Prussian  terri- 
tory west  of  the  River  Elbe  was  added  to  Jerome  Bonaparte's 
new  kingdom  of  Westphalia,  or  to  Louis  Bonaparte's  kingdom 
of  Holland.  Moreover,  Frederick  AVilliam,  now  a  mere  vassal 
of  the  French  Empire,  had  to  find  somewhere  more  than 
$30,000,000  to  reimburse  the  conqueror  for  the  cost  of  the  war. 
Until  he  found  it,  Berlin  and  all  his  great  fortresses  were  to 
remain  in  pawn,  with  the  French  army  continuing  to  occupy 
them. 

Louise  returned  to  Memel,  by  whose  lonely  Baltic  shore  she 
was  to  pass  many  long  and  sorrowful  months.  While  waiting 
there  for  the  evacuation  of  Berlin  and  the  restoration  of  her 
capital  and  her  home,  she  and  the  royal  family  of  Prussia  were 
reduced  to  plainer  fare  than  some  of  the  villagers.  Servants 
were  dismissed  and  horses  sold.  The  service  of  gold  plate,  a 
treasured  heirloom  of  the  Hohenzollerns,  was  melted  down 
and  coined  into  money  for  the  bankrupt  treasury  of  the  king- 
dom. Louise  even  parted  with  her  diamonds.  But  she  kept 
her  pearls,  ' '  for  pearls  betoken  tears,  and  I  have  shed  so  many 
of  them." 

It  was  not  until  Christmas  week  of  1809,  after  an  absence 
of  more  than  three  years,  that  Louise  returned  to  her  capital. 
But,  as  her  pastor  tells  us,  the  sparkle  in  her  eyes  did  not  come 
back  with  her  and  on  her  cheek  there  were  now  white  roses 
instead  of  red. 


246     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"While  Prussia  was  yet  sunk  in  the  depths,  the  Queen  found 
release  from  her  too  heavy  sorrows.  In  the  summer  of  1810 
and  in  the  thirty-fifth  year  of  her  life,  the  King  closed  the 
eyes  "which  had  so  faithfully  lighted  up  his  dark  path." 
Seven  of  the  nine  children  Louise  had  borne  in  sixteen  years 
of  wifehood  survived  her.  The  eldest  was  to  reign  as  King 
Frederick  William  IV,  and  on  his  death  to  be  succeeded  by  the 
second  son,  William  I,  while  a  daughter,  as  the  wife  of  Nich- 
olas I,  was  to  become  the  Czarina  of  Russia. 

The  wasted  body  was  laid  to  rest  among  the  pines  in  the 
park  of  the  palace  of  Charlottenburg,  that  now  populous  sub- 
urb of  Berlin.  Her  effigy,  carved  by  the  celebrated  sculptor 
Rauch  out  of  Carrara  marble  as  white  and  pure  as  her  woman 's 
soul,  reclines  upon  her  sarcophagus,  after  having  been,  like 
herself,  a  prey  to  war.  For  while  it  was  on  its  voyage  from 
Italy  aboard  a  British  merchantman,  the  statue  was  seized  by 
an  American  privateer  in  the  War  of  1812,  but  only  to  be  re- 
captured by  a  British  frigate  which  carried  it  in  safety  to  its 
destination. 

Though  the  mortal  Queen  slept  in  her  grave,  her  dauntless 
spirit  went  marching  on,  a  lamp  unto  the  feet  of  her  people. 
When  threescore  years  had  passed,  an  old  man  came  to  kneel 
in  prayer  by  her  tomb.  It  was  on  that  day,  July  19,  1870, 
the  sixtieth  anniversary  of  her  death,  that  the  Franco-Prussian 
War  began,  a  conflict  which  history  was  to  charge  to  a  Bona- 
parte Empress  as  it  had  charged  an  earlier  conflict  to  a  Hohen- 
zollern  Queen. 

The  aged  man  in  the  mausoleum  at  Charlottenburg  was 
William  I,  King  of  Prussia,  and  he  had  come  on  a  filial  pil- 
grimage to  invoke  the  inspiration  of  his  mother's  memory  as 
he  was  setting  out  upon  his  avenging  march  to  Paris  and  to 
the  realisation  of  Louise 's  vision,  a  union  of  the  Germanic  na- 
tions in  a  German  Empire. 


CHAPTER  XXX 

NAPOLEON'S  MARSHALS 

THE  marshals  who  surrounded  and  supported  the  throne 
of  Napoleon  form  a  remarkable  exhibition  of  the  pro- 
ductive power  of  democracy. 

Although  the  Emperor  flattered  himself  that  he  made  his 
marshals  out  of  mud,  those  eagles  really  were  hatched  out  of 
the  fertile  egg  of  the  Revolution.  The  Republic,  not  the  Em- 
pire, was  their  opportunity.  Every  one  of  them  already  had 
won  rank  before  serving  under  Napoleon.  Three  among  them 
were  colonels,  four  brigadiers,  and  one  was  a  chief  of  staff, 
while  full  fifteen  had  risen  to  the  high  distinction  of  division 
commanders  ere  he  became  the  fountain  of  honour. 

All  but  five  of  that  brilliant  company  were  sous  of  the  peo- 
ple, and  all  but  seven  started  at  the  bottom  as  common  soldiers. 
Murat's  father  was  a  country  tavern  keeper,  Ney's  a  cooper, 
Augureau's  a  mason,  Lefebre's  an  enlisted  soldier,  Massena's 
a  tanner  and  soap  boiler,  Oudinot's  a  brewer,  IMacdonald's  a 
Scotch  crofter,  Suchet  's  a  small  manufacturer,  Lannes '  a  poor 
mechanic,  while  Jourdan  and  Bessieres  were  sons  of  country 
physicians,  Bernadotte,  Soult,  Moncey,  and  Brune  of  country 
lawyers  or  notaries,  and  Mortier  and  St.  Cyr  of  little  farmers. 
Berthier's  father  was  an  office  holder  of  modest  rank  and  only 
Davout,  ]\Iarmont,  Grouchy,  Poniatowski,  and  Perignon  were 
of  noble  origin. 

None  but  Davout,  IMarmont,  and  St.  Cyr  ever  had  seen  the 
inside  of  a  military  school.  All  except  Berthier,  Davout,  Mac- 
donald,  Marmont,  Grouchy,  Perignon,  and  Poniatowski  had 
started  in  the  trade  of  M'ar  with  the  musket  of  a  private. 

Massena  was  content  to  serve  in  the  ranks  fourteen  years, 
and    Bernadotte    nine    years    without    rising    above    a    ser- 

247 


248  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

geancy.  Soult,  in  spite  of  a  club  foot,  was  accepted  by  the 
enlisting  officers  and  well  content  with  a  sergeant's  chevron. 
Lannes  ran  away  from  a  dyer  to  whom  he  had  been  appren- 
ticed, and  went  into  the  army,  but  was  turned  out  as  a  person 
of  insubordinate  temper,  while  Oudinot  after  two  years  of 
soldiering  preferred  a  life  among  his  father's  beer  vats.  Ney, 
on  the  other  hand,  chose  to  be  a  hussar  rather  than  the  coal 
miner  his  family  wished  him  to  be.  For  the  better  part  of 
twenty  years,  Augureau  was  a  wandering  soldier  of  fortune, 
serving  in  the  armies  of  France,  Russia,  Prussia,  and  Naples. 
Moncey  alone  among  those  future  marshals  hidden  in  the  ranks 
of  King  Louis'  army  did  win  a  captaincy,  but  only  after  twen- 
ty-three years  of  service,  while  Victor  saw  ten  and  Lefebre 
sixteen  years  of  service  without  a  commission. 

The  Revolution  came  and  the  aristocratic  froth  was  blown 
off  at  a  breadth  ;  the  pressure  of  caste  was  lifted  from  the  army, 
and  merit  creamed  to  the  top.  Privates  were  transformed 
into  colonels,  and  sergeants  into  generals  in  a  month  of  cam- 
paigning.    Every  man  quickly  found  his  true  level. 

It  was  a  wonderful  example  of  what  democracy  can  do. 
If  the  civil  life  of  France  had  been  democratized  as  the 
army  was,  the  Empire  might  never  have  risen.  If  the  Revo- 
lution had  gone  to  the  people  for  its  political  leaders  as  well 
as  for  its  army  leaders,  if  the  doors  had  been  thrown  open  as 
freely  to  civil  as  to  military  talent,  the  Republic  might  have 
been  saved. 

But  while  the  republican  armies  under  the  leadership  of 
men  who  had  sprung  from  the  lowest  ranks  were  conquering 
the  martial  aristocracies  of  Europe,  the  politicians  of  the  revo- 
lutionary epoch  were  all  drawn  from  the  old  ruling  classes. 
The  Republic,  triumphant  abroad,  perished  at  home  under  the 
feeble  and  selfish  rule  of  ex-nobles,  ex-clergymen,  and  lawyers. 
It  was  not  the  sword,  but  the  statesmanship  of  Napoleon  that 
France  needed  and  invoked  when  she  surrendered  to  his  mas- 
tery. 

With  the  fall  of  the  Republic,  the  democracy  of  the  army 
was  lost.  When  the  Corsican  artilleryman  seized  for  himself 
the  sceptre  of  empire,  he  rewarded  and  reconciled  his  com- 


NAPOLEON'S  MARSHALS  249 

panions  in  arms,  the  one-time  privates  and  sergeants,  by  plac- 
ing in  their  hands  the  batons  of  marshals  of  France.  Creating 
at  once  fourteen  active  marshals  and  flattering  four  old  gen- 
erals of  the  Revolution  with  the  title  of  honourary  marshals, 
he  distributed  in  all  twenty-six  batons  in  the  course  of  the 
Empire. 

Love  of  country  no  longer  being  potent  to  inspire  devotion, 
he  frankly  appealed  to  personal  selfishness  as  the  incentive 
to  service.  "In  ambition,"  he  said,  "is  to  be  found  the 
chief  motive  force  of  humanity,  and  a  man  puts  forth  his  best 
powers  in  proportion  to  his  hopes  of  advancement. ' '  But  am- 
bition, once  aroused,  never  is  satisfied.  The  more  it  has,  the 
more  it  wants.  Mere  batons  did  not  long  suffice  the  marshals, 
who  clamoured  for  more  and  yet  more. 

Naturally  men  are  not  content  to  serve  a  throne  as  cheaply 
as  they  will  serve  a  people,  that  is  to  say,  serve  themselves. 
The  generals  of  the  French  Republic  were  happy  with  $8000 
a  year,  while  the  American  Republic  has  put  armies  in  the  field 
as  large  as  those  enrolled  under  the  Empire  of  Napoleon,  and 
yet  never  has  found  it  necessary  to  pay  its  greatest  generals 
more  than  $13,500  a  year. 

When  the  title  deed  to  France  had  been  made  out  anew  in 
the  name  of  one  man  and  the  nation  became  the  patrimony  of 
his  heirs,  the  peasant  marshals  soon  had  to  be  appeased  with 
hereditary  titles  and  estates  that  they  could  transmit  to  their 
children.  The  Emperor,  therefore,  established  an  aristocracy 
with  his  marshals  for  its  pillars. 

Once  he  had  proclaimed  the  Empire  and  set  up  a  throne,  this 
step  may  have  been  a  necessity,  as  it  surely  was  a  pleasure  for 
Napoleon.  He  was  always  glad  to  share  his  fortunes  with  those 
around  him,  and  now  he  opened  wide  his  hands  and  rained 
titles  and  riches  in  a  torrent.  He  scattered  abroad  in  ten 
years  more  titular  honours  than  ever  fell  from  another  throne 
in  100,  creating  48,000  chevaliers  of  the  Legion  of  Honour, 
1000  barons,  388  counts,  31  dukes,  and  4  princes. 

With  each  patent  of  nobility,  he  made  a  gift  enabling  the 
recipient  to  support  his  title.  But  he  prudently  took  care  not 
to  burden  the  French  taxpayers  with  the  upkeep  of  the  newly 


250     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

made  aristocracy.  He  did  not  venture  to  challenge  the  dor- 
mant republicanism  of  the  country  by  drawing  even  the  bare 
titles  from  France.  On  the  contrary,  he  drew  upon  conquered 
lands  for  his  ducal  names,  the  marshals  often  being  ennobled 
by  titles  that  recalled  to  French  pride  victories  on  alien  battle- 
fields. 

Just  as  it  was  his  practice  to  quarter  his  army  on  foreigners, 
and  make  it  cost  the  people  of  France  as  little  as  possible,  he 
quartered  his  nobility  on  foreign  countries.  He  distributed 
among  his  military  men  some  $5,000,000  that  he  brought  back 
from  his  Prussian  campaign,  and  besides  he  bestowed  upon  the 
marshals  and  their  heirs  forever  a  fixed  percentage  of  the 
yearly  revenues  of  crown  domains  wrested  from  conquered 
sovereigns  and  of  ancient  fiefs  in  Italy,  Dalmatia,  Poland,  and 
Germany. 

Lannes  received  at  once  $250,000  in  cash  and  $65,000  a  year ; 
Davout  $60,000  in  cash  and  nearly  $40,000  a  year;  Berthier 
$100,000  in  cash  and  $80,000  a  year;  Ney  $60,000  in  cash  and 
$45,000  a  year,  and  thus  the  donations  ranged.  From  time 
to  time  they  were  enlarged  as  fresh  rewards  were  won  until 
the  most  fortunate  drew  $250,000  a  year. 

"Pillage  not,"  the  Emperor  abjured  them.  "I  will  give 
you  more  than  you  can  take. ' '  His  benefactions  fell  upon  the 
entire  army,  including  the  privates,  every  rank  receiving  its 
share. 

It  was  the  Emperor's  boast  that  he  made  giants  out  of  dwarfs 
among  his  marshals,  but  it  is  equally  true  that  in  a  few  cases 
he  made  dwarfs  out  of  giants.  His  genius  developed  the  lesser 
men  but  arrested  the  development  of  the  larger  natures.  The 
former  shone  in  his  reflected  glory,  but  the  latter  languished 
in  his  shadow.  Those  fitted  only  to  obey  climbed  to  fame  on 
his  shoulders,  while  those  capable  of  command  lost  their  native 
independence. 

' '  I  alone  know  what  I  want  done, ' '  he  gave  all  his  marshals 
to  understand.  "The  Emperor,"  his  chief  of  staff  announced 
to  them,  "has  no  need  of  advice  or  of  any  one  acting  on  his 
own  responsibility.  No  one  knows  his  thoughts ;  it  is  our  duty 
to  obey." 


NAPOLEON'S  IiIARSHALS  251 

Napoleon  could  add  nothing  to  the  stature  of  ]\Iassena,  Soult, 
Davout,  and  Suchet,  born  leaders  whom  he  led  until  their 
power  of  initiative  was  weakened.  Not  that  they  would  have 
been  really  great  in  any  circumstances;  yet  they  might  have 
been  stronger  but  for  his  overwhelming  strength. 

On  the  other  hand,  marshals  like  Murat,  Ney,  Berthier,  Le- 
febre,  Augureau,  Bessieres,  were  perhaps  only  ordinary  men, 
each  with  some  extraordinary  quality  which  Napoleon  knew 
how  to  employ  without  suffering  from  the  consequences  of 
their  defects  and  their  ill-balanced  characters.  For  he  was 
not  afraid  of  the  wildest  genius,  but  was  confident  that  he 
could  bridle  and  ride  it. 

"I  know  the  depth  and  draft  of  all  my  generals,"  he  said. 
This  one  was  stupid,  that  one  mad,  this  one  was  an  ass,  that 
one  a  tiger ;  this  one  was  too  slow,  that  one  too  swift ;  this  one 
had  no  nerve,  that  one  had  no  prudence.  But  when  yoked 
together  and  guided  and  goaded  by  the  master  hand,  those 
strangely  assorted  marshals  of  the  Empire  were  such  a  team 
as  never  has  been  matched  in  the  annals  of  war. 

The  Emperor  rejoiced  in  fulfilling  his  promise  to  make  "the 
fortunes  of  those  who  have  worked  with  me  to  found  the  Em- 
pire and  the  fortune  of  their  children."  As  the  valiant  sous 
of  the  Revolution  gained  the  heights  of  imperial  grandeur, 
however,  the  ladder  by  which  they  had  climbed  from  obscurity 
to  distinction,  from  democracy  to  aristocracy,  was  kicked  over. 

The  Emperor  still  stirred  his  soldiers  with  the  illusory  hope 
that  any  one  of  them  might  find  a  marshal 's  baton  in  his  knap- 
sack. Alas,  none  of  them  did.  For  the  batons  were  all  gone 
and  no  marshal  of  France  emerged  from  the  ranks  of  the 
Grand  Army.  Although  the  Emperor  continued  to  proclaim 
the  promise  of  a  career  open  to  every  talent,  all  those  titles 
and  estates  which  he  had  created  were  mortgages  on  posterity, 
perpetual  entails,  each  of  which  forever  closed  a  door  to  talent 
and  merit. 

Free  trade  in  genius  was  at  an  end. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 

VICTORIES  OF  PEACE 

MORE  blood  has  been  spilt  in  the  streets  of  Paris  to 
overthrow  monarchies  than  on  any  other  equal  space 
of  earth.  Yet  those  streets  all  seem  as  if  they  surely 
must  lead  up  to  a  throne.  London,  in  whose  narrow,  tangled 
ways  confusion  reigns  and  there  is  no  sign  of  the  presence  of 
a  king,  expresses  English  freedom  and  English  individualism. 

But  its  sister  city  across  the  Channel  plainly  is  a  made-to- 
order  town  and  the  prettily  arranged  stage  setting  of  a  court. 
The  broad,  tree-lined  boulevards,  with  their  miles  and  miles  of 
windows  and  mansard  roofs  on  a  tyrannical  level,  with  their 
arbitrary  vistas  of  splendid  palaces  and  churches  and  monu- 
ments, wear  an  air  of  regal  magnificence  that  mocks  the  French 
Republic  in  its  own  capital  and  ridicules  the  republican  sim- 
plicity of  a  president. 

Napoleon,  at  the  height  of  the  Empire,  stamped  his  image 
upon  the  city  and  made  it  his  monument.  The  Empire  fell 
and  rose  only  to  fall  again.  Bourbons  and  Orleanists  have 
come  and  gone.  The  Commune  tossed  in  its  fitful  fever.  The 
Republic  lived  and  died  and  has  been  born  anew.  But  through 
all  its  vicissitudes  Paris  has  remained  unchangingly  imperial. 
Art  is  long  and  beauty  endures. 

Although  the  British  metropolis,  with  a  population  of 
1,100,000  in  1801,  was  twice  the  size  of  the  French  metropolis, 
Napoleon  boasted  that  "London  is  a  comer  of  the  world; 
Paris  is  the  centre."  He  resolved  at  once  to  make  himself 
the  Caesar  and  his  capital  the  Rome  of  the  modern  world. 
Wars  delayed  and  his  downfall  defeated  many  of  his  plans. 
The  Second  Empire  took  up  the  unfinished  work  of  the  First 
and  completed  the  transformation  of  the  city  from  a  dingy, 

mediseval  town. 

252 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  253 

Napoleon  enlarged  the  palace  of  the  Louvre,  which  500 
years  before  had  been  built  in  the  field  by  the  Seine  where 
the  wolf  hunters  met,  and  he  crowded  it  with  the  art  of  con- 
quered lands  until  it  held  the  greatest  collection  of  paintings 
and  sculptures  ever  assembled  under  one  roof.  From  the  win- 
dows of  the  adjoining  palace  of  the  Tuileries,  which  250 
years  before  had  been  erected  among  the  tile  kilns,  he  looked 
out  on  the  clothes  yard  of  Paris,  where  the  housewives  came 
to  do  their  washing  in  the  river.  On  the  other  side  of  the 
palace  he  found  himself  shut  in  by  a  lot  of  old  convents  and 
all  manner  of  ramshackle  buildings. 

He  cleared  the  river  bank  and  lined  it  with  broad  quays. 
He  tore  away  the  huddle  of  unsightly  structures  at  his  palace 
gate  and  laid  out  there  what  is  still  one  of  the  most  important 
and  imposing  sections  of  the  city.  Opening  a  magnificent 
street  facing  the  Seine  for  nearly  two  miles,  he  named  it  for 
the  Battle  of  Rivoli.  Directing  that  it  should  have  an  arcaded 
sidewalk  in  the  Italian  manner,  he  prescribed  so  closely  a  uni- 
formity in  skyline  and  architecture  that  every  window  and 
roof  and  comer  of  this  Rue  de  Rivoli  still  must  conform  to 
his  original  design.  Out  of  that  great  street,  he  ran  two  other 
now  noted  streets,  which  commemorate  his  battles — the  Rue 
Castiglione  and  the  Rue  des  Pyramids — but  a  third  no  longer 
is  the  Rue  Napoleon ;  it  has  become  instead  the  street  of  peace, 
the  celebrated  Rue  de  la  Paix. 

In  the  centre  of  this  magnificent  quarter,  he  reared  on  a 
pedestal  of  Corsican  granite  the  noble  column  that  adorns  the 
spacious  Place  Vendome  and  encased  its  masonry  in  metal 
plates  made  from  1200  Austrian  and  Russian  cannons.  On 
those  sheets  of  bronze  he  caused  to  be  engraved  in  pictures  the 
story  of  the  campaigns  of  Ulm  and  Austerlitz,  while  he  sur- 
mounted the  lofty  column  with  a  statue  of  himself  in  his  im- 
perial robes. 

When  the  Empire  fell,  the  Bourbons  hurled  to  the  earth  that 
effigy  of  the  Emperor  and  recast  its  metal  into  a  statue  of 
Henry  of  Navarre,  which  now  stands  on  the  Pont  Neuf  over 
the  Seine.  King  Louis  Philippe,  however,  crowned  the  column 
with  another  statue  of  Napoleon,  but  in  the  familiar  garb  of 


254  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  victorious  General-in-chief,  which  in  due  time  Napoleon  III 
replaced  with  still  another  in  the  drapery  of  the  Emperor. 
This,  in  turn,  was  overthrown  by  the  communists  in  1871,  but 
the  Third  Republic  gathered  up  the  fragments,  joined  them 
together,  and  the  conqueror  in  his  imperial  mantle  continues  to 
dominate  Paris. 

Even  while  the  Vendome  column  was  in  process  of  construc- 
tion, Napoleon  suddenly  determined  to  have  another  memorial 
of  the  campaign  of  1805.  Summoning  his  architect  in  the 
night,  he  ordered  him  to  begin  the  work  the  next  day.  Wlien 
the  Emperor  looked  out  in  the  morning,  he  saw  500  workmen 
digging  the  foundations  for  the  now  famous  Arch  of  the  Car- 
rousel, between  the  Tuileries  and  the  Louvre.  On  the  comple- 
tion of  the  arch  he  crowned  it  with  one  of  the  proudest  of  his 
trophies  of  conquest,  the  celebrated  bronze  horses  of  Venice, 
which  had  been  prizes  of  war  in  the  reigns  of  Nero,  Trajan 
and  Constantine,  if  not  indeed  of  Alexander  the  Great. 

Another  arch,  the  largest  in  the  world,  the  Arc  de  Triomphe 
de  I'Etoile,  was  begun  at  his  command.  Seen  afar,  this  beau- 
tiful arch  of  the  star,  rising  from  a  gentle  eminence  in  the 
present  day  centre  of  fashion,  seems  to  be  swimming  in  the  sky 
above  the  trees  of  the  Champs  Elysees  and  as  impalpable  as  a 
fleecy  cloud.  The  streets  approaching  it  are  the  namesakes  of 
the  fields  or  companions  of  Napoleon's  glory.  The  Avenues 
du  Bois  Boulogne,  de  la  Grande  Armee,  Jena,  Wagram,  Fried- 
land,  and  Kleber,  and  the  Rue  Tilsit,  and  the  Rue  Pressbourg, 
each  brings  its  special  tribute  to  the  feet  of  the  arch.  Among 
the  bronzes  that  embellish  this  huge  and  noble  pile  of  marble, 
there  is  one  which  celebrates  no  victory  and  yet  commemorates 
the  victor  at  his  best.  It  is  the  memorial  of  a  simple  friend- 
ship of  his  youth  and  represents  the  death  of  young  Muiron, 
who  was  a  comrade  at  Toulon  and  who  laid  down  his  life  for 
his  friend  on  the  bridge  of  Arcole. 

One  more  monument  to  war  which  Napoleon  designed,  he 
afterward  changed  into  a  church,  the  classic  Madelene,  whose 
pagan  beauty  betrays  its  builder's  first  purpose,  when  he 
planned  to  make  it  a  Temple  of  Glory  and  fill  it  with  the 
statues  and  tombs  of  his  warriors.     But  he  himself  was  not 


Some   Portraits   of   the   Emperor 

1,  by  Gosse,  2,  by  Vernet,  3,  by  Delaroche,  4,  from  a  miniature,   5, 
by  David 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  255 

to  lie  in  the  midst  of  them.  On  the  contrary,  he  chose  to  sleep 
among  the  kings  that  crov;d  the  homely  old  church  at  St.  Denis 
on  the  edge  of  Paris.  Personally  reserving  there  a  space  for 
his  grave,  he  ordered  the  restoration  of  the  edifice  which  had 
been  desecrated  by  the  revolutionists. 

While  providing  burial  places  for  himself  and  his  marshals, 
he  took  thought  at  the  same  time  of  the  mortuary  needs  of  all 
the  people  of  Paris  outside  the  city  and  directed  the  opening  of 
four  cemeteries  such  as  he  had  seen  in  Germany.  The  first  and 
most  renowned  of  these  was  laid  out  in  what  formerly  was  the 
private  park  of  the  father  confessor  of  Louis  XIV — Pere  La- 
chaise.  Until  then  cemeteries  were  unknown  in  Paris,  and 
bodies  were  heaped  in  confusion  beneath  church  floors  or  found 
no  abiding  place  anywhere. 

A  complete  catalogue  of  Napoleon's  contributions  to  the 
beauty  of  Paris  would  be  large.  He  gave  the  present  Chamber 
of  Deputies  its  classic  facade,  the  Pantheon  its  noble  pediment 
and  the  Luxembourg  its  now  celebrated  museum. 

He  had  none  of  the  soldier's  indifference  to  nor  the  aristo- 
crat's contempt  for  trade.  He  wished  to  see  Paris  the  finan- 
cial as  well  as  the  political  capital  of  Europe.  While  engaged 
in  his  Polish  campaign,  he  issued  orders  for  the  construction  of 
an  exchange  which  should  correspond  to  the  splendour  of  his 
capital  and  the  great  volume  of  business  he  hoped  to  develop, 
"It  must  be  vast,"  he  insisted,  ''with  walks  all  round  it.  It 
must  stand  by  itself."  Therefore,  the  famous  Bourse,  the 
richest  stock  exchange  in  the  world,  rises  like  a  temple  in  the 
busy  marts  of  the  city. 

The  Emperor  dreamed  of  a  Paris  with  2,000.000,  even 
4,000,000  people  gathered  within  its  boundaries,  the  most 
populous  city  in  the  history  of  the  earth — "something  fab- 
ulous," he  said,  "colossal,  unexampled."  A  minister  urged 
him  not  to  stimulate  the  growth  of  the  city  because  it  was 
already  difficult  for  its  inhabitants  to  supply  themselves  with 
food  and  water.  Napoleon  met  that  objection  by  summarily 
abolishing  the  hundreds  of  inefficient  and  insanitary  slaughter 
houses  and  promptly  establishing  a  few  great  central  abattoirs 
and  organising  a  vast  public  market. 


256     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

At  the  same  time  he  ordered  that  the  construction  of  a  canal 
be  started  the  very  next  day  for  the  twofold  purpose  of  bring- 
ing to  the  city  water  and  barges  laden  with  the  produce  of  the 
country.  There  was  then  no  water  for  the  streets  or  for  horses, 
and  the  people  had  to  buy  the  water  for  their  household  needs 
at  one  cent  a  pail,  but  he  persisted  in  his  plan  until  it  was  as 
free  as  air  in  Paris.  New  fountains  were  set  up  and  old  ones 
revived,  which  together  yielded  an  abundant  supply  on  every 
hand  for  the  people,  the  horses  and  the  streets.  "In  the  dis- 
tricts of  St.  Denis  and  St.  Martin,"  the  watchful  master  of 
Europe  complained  after  all  these  provisions  had  been  made, 
' '  there  are  three  fountains  without  water. ' ' 

He  w^as  as  attentive  to  the  streets  of  his  capital  as  to  his 
military  lines  of  communication  when  conducting  a  campaign. 
There  were  only  three  or  four  sidewalks  in  all  Paris  until  he 
ordered  them  laid  throughout  the  city.  He  found  the  streets 
swarming  with  robbers  at  night  and  beggars  by  day.  He  sup- 
pressed robbery  by  introducing  an  efficient  police  force,  the 
familiar  gendarmerie  which  all  the  cities  of  Europe  have  imi- 
tated, and  he  attacked  mendicancy  by  opening  houses  of 
charity  and  workshops.  "Every  beggar  shall  be  arrested," 
he  directed;  "but  to  arrest  him  in  order  to  put  him  in  prison 
would  be  barbarous  and  absurd.  He  must  be  arrested  in  order 
that  he  may  be  taught  to  earn  a  livelihood  by  work, ' ' 

This  ruler  who  had  hungered  in  those  streets  of  Paris  knew 
that  bullets  were  not  the  proper  remedy  for  want.  ' '  I  would 
rather  fight  an  army  of  200,000  men  than  have  to  put  down  a 
bread  riot,"  he  said,  and  he  expressed  two  simple  and  prac- 
tical measures  in  these  orders :  "If  the  cold  returns,  have  big 
fires  lighted  in  the  churches  and  other  public  places  so  they 
may  warm  large  numbers  of  people."  "The  winter  will  be 
severe  and  meat  very  dear.     We  must  make  work  in  Paris. ' ' 

While  he  was  in  Germany,  nearly  a  thousand  miles  from 
Paris,  he  wrote  to  his  officials  that  a  "disease  called  croup," 
which  was  fatal  to  children,  had  risen  there  and  was  spreading 
to  France.  He  offered  a.  liberal  money  prize  for  the  physician 
who  should  propose  the  best  treatment  of  the  ailment. 

Nor  did  he  neglect  the  nation  or  any  part  of  his  immense 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  257 

Empire.  The  network  of  canals  that  carry  the  commerce  of 
France  to-day  was  systematised  by  him.  It  was  he  who  or- 
dered the  construction  of  waterways  that  linked  all  the  rivers 
in  the  country. 

The  unequalled  system  of  highways  in  France  was  inau- 
gurated by  him  and  toll  gates  were  torn  away.  Applying  his 
hammers  to  the  Alps,  he  did  what  the  Romans  had  not  dared 
to  try,  tracing  through  blocks  of  granite,  smooth,  spacious 
roads  over  and  under  mountains  which  had  interposed  since 
time  began  to 

Make  enemies  of  nations  who  had  else 
Like  kindred  drops,  been  mingled  into  one. 

Wherever  he  found  a  barrier  between  men,  whether  of  na- 
ture or  of  law,  he  impetuously  threw  himself  against  it  in  a 
fury  to  remove  it.  Capturing  a  city,  he  levelled  its  walls. 
Capturing  a  citadel,  he  dismantled  it.  The  first  general  of 
modern  times  to  lead  a  big  army  over  the  Alps,  he  constructed 
pleasant  promenades  across  them  by  which  the  merest  holiday 
soldier  was  freely  challenged  to  invade  France. 

The  great  Simplon  road  from  Switzerland  into  Italy  cost 
$25,000  a  mile  and  as  many  as  30,000  workmen  were  employed 
upon  it  at  one  time.  There  is  no  more  fitting  monument  of 
the  constructive  genius  of  Napoleon  than  the  gallery  of  Gondo 
on  the  Simplon,  where  a  tunnel  nearly  two  hundred  and  fifty 
yards  long  pierces  an  enormous  mass  of  rock  that  seemed  to 
make  the  road  impossible.  No  traveller  reads  without  a  thrill 
of  admiration  the  inscription  at  the  portal  of  the  tunnel : 

Aere  Italo,  1805,  Nap,  Imp. 

Two  other  Alpine  roads  of  his  reign  are  the  IMt.  Cenis  and 
that  over  INIont  Genevre,  both  leading  from  France  into  Italy. 
A  fourth  is  the  Grande  Corniche,  the  noblest  road  in  the 
world,  which  he  built  so  high  up  on  the  brow  of  the  Maritime 
Alps  from  Nice  to  Mentone  that  the  British  gunboats  could 
not  shell  an  army  marching  by  it  into  Italy.  From  IMetz  to 
Mayence  on  the  Rhine  he  threw  a  highway  across  trackless 
marshes  and  through  vast  forests. 


258  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  great  ports  of  Antwerp,  Cherbourg,  and  Boulogne  are 
more  indebted  to  his  reign  than  to  any  other  for  their  present 
importance.  The  facade  of  the  Milan  cathedral  had  waited 
400  years  to  be  completed,  but  he  ordered  it  finished  in  short 
order.  At  the  same  time,  he  decreed  the  construction  of  the 
pretty  marble  arch  which  marks  in  that  city  the  completion 
of  the  Simplon  road.  Canova's  bronze  statue  of  the  Em- 
peror's nude  figure,  which  was  designed  for  the  arch,  stands 
instead  in  the  courtyard  of  the  Brera  Gallery  at  Milan. 

On  a  brief  visit  to  Venice,  Napoleon  ordered  the  demolition 
of  a  group  of  old  monasteries  and  laid  out  the  Public  Garden ; 
transferred  the  cathedral  honours  from  St.  Peter's  to  the  more 
famous  church  of  St.  Mark's,  and  authorised  the  expenditure 
of  $1,000,000  in  improving  the  harbour  and  the  canals. 

He  was  never  to  see  Rome,  but  in  anticipation  of  a  visit  to 
the  Eternal  City  after  his  return  from  Russia,  he  planned  its 
restoration  and  the  construction  of  roads  and  canals  for  its 
benefit.  To  the  same  end  he  ordered  from  the  sculptor,  Thor- 
waldsen,  the  celebrated  relief,  the  Triumph  of  Alexander,  as  an 
adornment  for  the  walls  of  the  Quirinal  palace,  but  reverses 
overtaking  him,  the  sculpture  passed  into  other  hands.  It 
now  forms  the  frieze  of  the  jNIarble  Hall  in  the  Carlotta  Villa 
on  Lake  Como,  while  only  a  plaster  copy  of  it  has  been  set  up 
in  the  palace  of  the  King  of  Italy  on  the  Quirinal. 

For  the  most  part  Napoleon  wrought  in  stone  and  was  in 
reaction  from  the  idealism  that  preceded  the  Empire  and  ran 
riot.  Still  he  remained  obedient  to  many  of  the  solid,  tangible 
purposes  of  the  Revolution  which  sent  him  forth.  He  up- 
rooted ancient  injustice  all  along  his  way  and  planted  liberal 
institutions  throughout  Europe.  Even  to  faraway  Poland,  he 
carried  modern  laws,  freeing  the  serfs  and  the  land,  while 
Prussia  emulated  the  example  of  her  conqueror  and  feudalism 
disappeared  from  Germany  in  a  year.  "Let  every  species  of 
serfage  be  abolished, ' '  he  commanded  his  brother  Jerome,  when 
setting  him  upon  the  throne  of  AVestphalia.  "The  benefits  of 
the  Code  Napoleon,  the  publicity  of  court  proceedings,  the  es- 
tablishment of  juries  should  form  so  many  distinctive  char- 
acteristics of  your  monarchy." 


Some   Napoleonic    Autogk^vphs 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  259 

He  did  more  for  the  emancipation  of  the  Jews  than  all  other 
rulers  together  in  three  centuries.  He  convoked  their  leaders 
in  the  famous  French  Sanhedrim  of  1807  and  his  Madrid 
decree  still  is  their  charter  of  rights  in  the  lands  that  formed 
his  Empire.  "All  men  are  brothers  before  God,"  he  de- 
clared to  a  deputation  composed  of  a  Catholic  priest,  a  Protes- 
tant minister,  and  a  Jewish  rabbi,  and  he  gave  that  brother- 
hood the  force  of  law  nearly  everywhere  in  Europe.  How  far 
be  stood  in  advance  of  even  the  more  progressive  nations  may 
be  measured  by  the  fact  that  the  earl  marshal  of  England, 
the  Duke  of  Norfolk,  still  was  debarred  from  a  seat  in 
the  House  of  Lords  because  he  was  a  Catholic,  while  George  III 
dismissed  a  British  cabinet  in  1807  because  it  favoured  the 
emancipation  of  the  Catholics,  a  measure  of  justice  that  was 
refused  until  1829.  And  it  was  not  until  1858  that  England 
emancipated  the  Jews. 

Notwithstanding  its  comparative  liberalism  in  many  things, 
the  Empire  of  Napoleon  was  not  of  the  higher  realm  of  the 
spirit,  but  a  splendid  materialism.  While  he  established  the 
University  of  France  and  organized  schools  for  the  few,  his 
energies  were  wholly  directed  toward  fitting  men  for  his  serv- 
ice. He  did  nothing  for  popular  education.  The  Empire 
found  96  per  cent,  of  the  people  illiterate — think  of  it,  only 
four  Frenchmen  in  100  could  read  or  write ! — and  it  is 
doubtful  if  there  were  more  than  25,000  children  in  the  public 
primary  schools  of  France  at  any  time  while  Napoleon  was  on 
the  throne. 

The  finer  arts  languished  in  the  deep  shade  of  this  massive 
figure.  Notwithstanding  he  offered  liberal  yearly  prizes,  no 
great  poem  or  song,  no  great  opera  or  play  found  its  inspira- 
tion in  him.  Beethoven  dedicated  his  symphony,  "Eroica," 
to  the  First  Consul.  Wlien  his  republican  hero  put  on  the 
crown,  however,  the  composer  angrily  tore  oft'  the  dedication, 
trampled  it  under  his  feet  and  dedicated  the  immortal  sym- 
phony anew  to  the  ' '  memory  "  of  a  great  man ! 

Although  he  ordered  and  paid  for  paintings  by  the  yard — 
"eight  metres,  three  decimetres  in  height  and  four  metres  in 
breadth,  the  price  to  be  $2400" — he  admitted  that  it  was  "ab- 


260  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

surd  to  order  a  poet  to  write  an  ode  as  you  would  order  a 
dressmaker  to  make  a  muslin  gown."  Yet  he  seemed  often 
tempted  to  arrest  the  poets  and  musicians  for  their  ineffectual 
attempts  to  gild  the  gold  of  his  achievements.  "If  things  do 
not  go  on  better  at  the  opera, ' '  he  threatened,  ' '  I  will  put  in  a 
good  soldier  to  manage  it." 

In  the  end  this  masterful  man,  in  his  infinite  variety,  made 
himself  the  poet  and  the  orator  of  France.  The  map  of  Eu- 
rope was  the  sheet  whereon  he  wrote  the  greatest  epic  of  his 
time.  "However  vigorous  his  practical  faculty,"  says  Taine, 
in  his  study  of  Napoleon,  "his  poetic  faculty  is  stronger.  It 
is  even  too  vigorous  for  a  statesman;  its  grandeur  is  exag- 
gerated into  enormity,  and  its  enormity  degenerates  into  mad- 
ness." 

Napoleon's  proclamations  to  his  army  often  rose  to  the  clear 
heights  of  oratory.  Emerson  pronounced  his  battle  narratives 
as  good  as  Caesar's.  A  measure  of  his  activities  as  a  writer  is 
offered  by  his  published  correspondence,  filling  more  than 
thirty  volumes  and  comprising  nearly  30,000  documents. 

Yet  very  little  of  it  did  he  write  with  his  own  hand.  No 
pen  could  keep  up  with  his  thoughts.  His  words  flew  from  his 
lips  while  the  quills  of  his  secretaries,  with  no  system  of 
stenography  to  aid  them,  raced  to  put  on  paper  a  few  main 
points  and  characteristic  expressions  from  which  to  frame 
letters,  orders,  proclamations,  and  speed  them  by  couriers  to 
all  corners  of  the  Empire.  If  they  were  engulfed  by  the  tor- 
rent and  floundered,  he  cried  out  as  if  in  pain,  "I  cannot  re- 
peat ;  you  make  me  lose  the  thread  of  my  thought. ' ' 

He  did  not  have  time  even  to  subscribe  "Napoleon"  to  the 
documents  which  his  secretaries  laboriously  wrote  out  and  laid 
before  him ;  he  merely  jabbed  them  with  his  quill  and  made  an 
undecipherable  sign  which  yet  sufficed  to  give  them  full  force 
and  effect  throughout  Europe.  Sometimes  the  illegible  scratch 
was  intended  for  "Nap,"  but  as  the  terrible  pressure  weighed 
heavier  and  heavier  upon  him  he  made  only  a  fish  hook  for 
an  "N."  Thus  while  the  power  and  care  of  the  Emperor  in- 
creased his  autograph  diminished ;  as  the  man  grew  in  au- 
thority his  signature  grew  smaller  and  meaner. 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  261 

Just  as  the  one  letter  "N"  hastily  scrawled  sufficed  to  pro- 
claim his  will  to  a  docile  world  so  his  presence  needed  not  to 
be  heralded  by  any  long  title.  As  kings  and  princes  entered 
the  court  they  were  announced  by  all  their  proud  designations, 
but  when  the  doors  were  thrown  open  for  the  sovereign  of 
sovereigns  the  attendant  pronounced  only  the  simple,  yet  thrill- 
ing title,  "L'Empereur !" 

He  became  the  literature,  politics,  and  trade  of  France.  He 
held  no  councils  in  war  and  no  cabinet  meetings  in  peace. 
He  let  Talleyrand  go — "he  was  always  in  a  state  of  treason" — 
and  acted  as  his  own  minister  of  foreign  affairs.  He  abolished 
the  Tribunate  and  his  own  was  the  one  voice  left  in  the  nation. 
Strong,  stubborn  natures  fled  him,  and  those  who  remained 
sank  into  clerks  to  do  the  bidding  of  one  whom  Gladstone 
rated  "the  greatest  administrator  in  history." 

Generally  he  was  at  work  as  early  as  seven  in  the  morning, 
tearing  through  the  multitudinous  duties  of  an  Empire  which 
embraced  half  a  dozen  kingdoms  and  thirty  principalities. 
Sometimes  he  awoke  at  a  most  unreasonable  hour  and  called 
for  his  assistants,  shouting,  as  Baron  de  ]\Ieneval  tells  us, 
"Let  every  one  arise." 

The  financier  who  financed  that  enormous  Empire,  clothed, 
fed,  armed  its  tremendous  armies,  was  Napoleon  himself.  Gal- 
loping back  from  Austerlitz,  he  stole  into  Paris  in  the  night, 
and  after  an  absence  of  125  stirring  days,  sat  down  at  his  table 
as  if  he  had  only  returned  from  a  stroll.  Summoning  his 
ministers  in  council  at  eight  in  the  morning,  he  began  to 
straighten  out  the  tangled  finances  of  his  government,  re- 
organise its  income  and  outgo  and  establish  a  new  system  of 
double  entry  accounting. 

He  hated  a  public  debt.  The  debt  of  France  was  $100,000,- 
000,  when  he  began  to  fund  it,  and  he  swore  that  "as  long  as  I 
rule  I  shall  not  issue  any  paper."  At  the  height  of  his  power 
the  yearly  expenditures  ranged  from  $140,000,000  to  $180,- 
000,000.  He  made  his  army  pay  its  own  way  with  indemni- 
ties from  conquered  lands  and  subsidies  from  allied  states. 
Warfare  was  cheap  in  a  time  when  soldiers  received  only  a  few 
cents  a  day,  lived  off  the  couutr3\  and  ordnance  was  simple 


262     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

and  inexpensive.  The  army  pay  roll  was  hardly  ever  more 
than  $1,000,000  a  month. 

No  stock  speculator  ever  watched  the  ticker  more  closely 
than  Napoleon  watched  the  fluctuations  in  the  price  of  rentes, 
or  the  public  securities.  Their  par  value  was  100  francs, 
but  where  they  sold  for  only  twelve  francs  the  day  before 
he  seized  the  reins,  they  rose  steadily  until  the  victory  of 
Austerlitz  boosted  them  to  seventy  and  the  peace  of  Tilsit  to 
ninety.  Shortly  afterward  they  touched  ninety-three,  which 
represented  interest  at  the  rate  of  about  5  per  cent. 

The  Emperor's  attention  to  money  matters  was  not  limited  to 
high  finance.  He  watched  the  centimes  as  \ngilantly  as  the 
francs.  He  corrected  even  the  Empress'  laundry  bills  and  re- 
joiced over  the  saving  of  $7000  a  year  effected  by  his  having 
systematised  the  expenditures  for  the  155  cups  of  coffee  daily 
drunk  in  his  palaces.  He  made  his  marshals  and  courtiers, 
when  in  attendance  at  court,  furnish  their  own  blankets,  linen, 
towels,  firewood,  and  candles,  and  gave  them  nothing  but  the 
bare  beds.  Not  a  sip  of  soup  or  wine  could  be  obtained  in  any 
of  the  palaces  without  a  check  from  Duroc,  the  grand  marshal. 

Life  at  court  necessarily  was  robbed  of  its  joyousness  by 
such  a  spirit  of  cheese  paring  in  the  palaces,  the  upkeep  of 
which  was  reduced  to  an  allowance  of  only  $600,000  a  year, 
whereas  it  had  been  as  much  as  $5,000,000  under  the  Bourbons, 
when  the  broth  for  a  two-year-old  princess  cost  $1000  a  year, 
and  rolls  for  each  lady  in  waiting  $400.  Louis  XYI  spent 
$400,000  on  a  court  journey  to  Fontainebleau,  a  function  that 
Napoleon  duplicated,  in  outward  form  at  least,  for  $30,000. 

Yet  he  was  prodigal  with  rewards.  Every  man  in  France 
knew  that  if  he  devised  anything  useful  in  science  or  rendered 
an  important  service  the  Emperor  would  handsomely  repay 
him.  Napoleon  had  insisted  from  the  outset  that  the  Legion 
of  Honour  should  not  be  for  the  reward  of  soldiers  alone.  He 
contended,  on  the  contrary,  that  "all  sorts  of  merits  are  broth- 
ers," and  that  "intelligence  has  rights  before  force."  Hon- 
ours fell  upon  exceptional  men  in  every  calling.  As  the  cheva- 
liers of  the  Legion  came  and  went  through  life,  with  their  deco- 
rations on  their  coats,  sentries  presented  arms  and  the  gen- 


VICTORIES  OF  PEACE  263 

darme  lifted  his  sword;  their  sons  and  daughters  were  edu- 
cated by  the  state,  and  when  they  themselves  died,  a  squad  of 
twenty-five  soldiers  marched  beside  the  funeral  car. 

Many  broke  under  the  heavy  yoke  of  Napoleon.  He  said 
of  one  of  his  ministers  that  he  had  some  merit  at  first,  "but 
by  cramming  him  too  full  I  have  made  him  stupid. ' '  Decres 
groaned,  "that  terrible  man  has  subjugated  us  all."  Another 
of  his  ministerial  tools  said,  "I  used  to  think  I  saw  the  Em- 
peror standing  over  me  as  I  worked  shut  up  in  my  office. ' ' 

Compassionless  toward  himself,  this  taskmaster  was  not  with- 
out compassion  toward  others.  He  confessed  at  one  time  that 
he  had  already  worked  to  death  two  of  his  ministers  and  would 
have  killed  a  third  had  he  not  been  so  tough.  "The  lucky 
man, ' '  he  said,  "  is  he  who  hides  away  from  me  in  the  depth  of 
some  province.  "When  I  die,  people  will  draw  in  their  breath 
and  say  *ouf !'  " 

For  himself  there  was  no  hiding  place,  no  refuge  from  his 
morbid  restlessness,  no  escape  from  the  terrible  energies  that 
boiled  up  and  clamoured  within  him,  no  release  from  the  super- 
normality  with  which  nature  had  visited  him.  Power  warped 
his  whole  being.  He  lost  the  capacity  to  smile — he  never 
could  laugh.  Care  furrowed  his  face  and  left  his  eye  cold 
and  searching.  ' '  That  devil  of  a  man ! ' '  the  bold  ruffian  Van- 
damme  exclaimed.  "I,  who  fear  neither  God  nor  the  devil, 
tremble  like  a  child  when  I  approach  him.  He  could  make  me 
jump  through  the  eye  of  a  needle  into  the  fire." 

From  the  towering  summit  of  his  ow^n  eminence,  he  saw 
mankind  so  nearly  on  a  dead  level  below  him  that  individ- 
uality was  almost  lost.  The  imagination  and  plans  of  others 
could  not  keep  up  with  his  own  and  were  but  a  drag  upon  him. 
He  needed  only  the  arms  and  hands  and  legs  of  men  to  execute 
his  thoughts,  which  gushed  forth  spontaneously  like  water  from 
a  geyser. 

Thus,  one  man  absorbed  France  and  Europe  until  he  was 
all  in  all,  nations  and  armies,  commerce,  industry  and  litera- 
ture, kings,  queens,  princes,  ministers,  and  marshals,  like  fly- 
ing horses  in  a  merry-go-round,  revolving  on  his  Atlantean 
shoulders. 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

FORTUNE  TURNS 

1806-1809      AGE   36-39 

RETURNING  to  Paris  from  Tilsit  on  a  mid-summer 
morning  in  1807,  Napoleon  stood  on  the  summit  of 
power  and  looked  down  upon  a  continent  obedient  to 
his  will.  As  he  walked  the  giddy  heights,  however,  he  saw 
distant  peaks  that  seemed  to  rise  above  him  and  challenge  his 
aspiring  spirit  to  climb  higher  still.  Yet  all  the  roads  opening 
before  him,  whether  their  finger  posts  invited  him  to  Spain, 
or  to  Rome,  to  Divorce  or  to  Moscow,  inevitably  ran  down  hill, 
since  he  was  already  in  fact  at  the  top. 

He  was  at  peace  with  the  world  save  for  a  little  island  that 
lay  off  in  the  fog  of  the  North  Atlantic  like  "a  wart  on  the 
nose  of  Europe,"  as  he  contemptuously  described  it.  He  was 
confident  he  could  conquer  England  in  a  bloodless  campaign 
without  firing  another  gun  and  without  leaving  his  capital. 

With  the  flags  of  France  and  her  allied  nations  swept  from 
the  ocean,  and  English  vessels  excluded  from  the  harbours  of 
the  continent,  the  American  flag  had  become  the  favourite  ref- 
uge and  protector  of  a  great  commerce.  To  prevent  the  infant 
republic  of  the  west  taking  from  them  the  lead  in  the  carrying 
trade,  the  British  ministers  adopted  the  watchword,  ' '  No  trade 
except  through  England."  To  that  end  they  forbade  neutral 
ships  to  enter  any  port  of  Napoleon 's  empire  unless  they  first 
visited  an  English  port,  and  paid  a  heavy  tribute  to  the  British 
treasury.  Napoleon  thereupon  retorted  with  a  decree  which 
condemned  to  seizure  any  vessel  submitting  to  that  exaction. 

With  that  stroke  the  doom  of  the  commerce  of  the  seas  was 
complete.     The  great  waters  all  but  reverted  to  the  trackless 

264 


FORTUNE  TURNS  2( 

wastes  they  were  before  the  voyages  of  Columbus,  Gama,  and 
Magellan,  while  Napoleon  undertook  to  reopen  the  ancient 
overland  routes  to  the  east. 

The  new  world  was  now  involved  with  the  old  in  a  universal 
conflict.  It  was  estimated  that  only  one  in  eight  American 
vessels  crossing  the  Atlantic  escaped  capture  at  the  hands  of 
France  or  England. 

The  United  States,  seeking  at  once  to  protect  its  ships  and 
retaliate  on  both  of  the  belligerent  powers,  adopted  the  Em- 
bargo Act  in  1807,  To  that  end  Congress  forbade  American 
vessels  to  clear  for  European  ports,  and  it  sought  to  cut  off  Eu- 
rope from  American  supplies.  Nevertheless  the  stars  and 
stripes  continued  to  appear  in  European  waters.  Many 
American  ships  eluded  the  Embargo  Act  by  staying  away  from 
home  and  engaged  in  the  carrying  trade  between  foreign 
ports. 

By  a  further  decree,  however.  Napoleon  condemned  all  ves- 
sels of  the  United  States  entering  his  harbours,  since  they  had 
no  right  under  American  law  to  be  absent  from  their  own 
ports.  Obedient  to  this  last  act,  134  American  ships  were 
seized  in  a  year,  and  their  cargoes,  aggregating  in  value  $10,- 
000,000,  were  confiscated. 

When  England  saw  the  bayonets  of  Napoleon,  like  a  barbed 
wire  fence,  enclosing  the  shores  of  the  Atlantic  and  the  Baltic, 
the  Mediterranean  and  the  Adriatic,  she  sought  to  keep  the 
port  of  Copenhagen  open  to  her  trade  by  bombarding  that  city 
and  carrying  off  the  Danish  navy.  The  Emperor  at  the  same 
time  was  menacing  a  feeble  nation  at  the  other  extremity  of 
Europe  and  demanding  that  Lisbon,  the  only  southern  port 
where  the  British  flag  still  found  a  welcome,  should  be  closed. 
' '  If  Portugal  does  not  do  as  I  wish, ' '  he  stormed  at  the  Portu- 
guese ambassador,  "the  House  of  Braganza  will  cease  to  reign 
in  two  months.  I  will  no  longer  tolerate  an  English  ambas- 
sador in  Europe,  but  will  declare  war  against  any  power  that 
receives  one  at  its  court. ' ' 

He  was  determined  to  plant  his  guns  at  every  harbour  mouth 
on  the  continent  and  bar  England  from  the  land  as  effectually 
as  she  was  barring  France  from  the  sea.     The  few  poor  little 


266  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ports  of  the  Papal  States  did  not  escape  his  attention.  Pope 
Pius  VII  was  sternly  commanded  to  close  them  to  British 
trade  and  join  the  continental  alliance  against  Great  Britain, 

While  Pius  VII  discreetly  yielded  to  the  Commander-in- 
chief  of  an  army  of  800,000  soldiers  so  far  as  to  consent  to  the 
exclusion  of  British  trade  from  his  dominions,  he  refused  to 
declare  war  against  England  and  become  a  militant  ally  of 
France.  Thereupon  an  imperial  army  suddenly  entered 
Eome,  where  the  Papal  secretary  of  state  and  various  members 
of  the  cardinalate  were  arrested  and  deported  until  only 
twenty-one  cardinals  remained  in  the  city,  which  now  lay 
beneath  the  sword  of  Napoleon. 

The  little  kingdom  of  Portugal,  torn  between  the  master  of 
the  land  and  the  mistress  of  the  sea,  also  failed  to  meet  the  Em- 
peror's  demands  in  full,  and  he  hurled  upon  it  a  French  army 
of  invasion,  under  the  command  of  Junot.  Sir  Sidney  Smith, 
the  ubiquitous  rover  of  the  sea,  who  had  baffled  Napoleon  at 
Acre,  was  in  Lisbon  harbour  as  the  invaders  approached  the 
city,  and  he  induced  the  poor  mad  Queen  and  her  Prince  Re- 
gent to  board  one  of  his  ships.  AYhen,  therefore,  Junot  arrived 
at  the  palace  he  found  that  Smith  had  removed  the  Portuguese 
crown  beyond  his  reach  and  that  the  royal  family  had  flown  to 
their  Brazilian  colony.  There  the  fugitive  Braganzas  set  up 
a  throne  for  the  first  time  in  the  western  hemisphere  and  ul- 
timately founded  the  Empire  of  Brazil. 

A  squalid  brawl  in  the  wretched  royal  family  at  Madrid 
now  tempted  Napoleon  to  take  their  throne  away  from  them. 
Ferdinand,  the  Prince  of  the  Asturias  and  heir  to  the  crown 
of  Spain,  a  narrow,  dark  souled  young  man  of  twenty-three, 
rebelled  against  his  father,  and  both  turned  to  the  mighty 
Emperor,  each  appealing  for  his  protection  against  the  other. 
Son  and  father  were  plainly  told  that  neither  should  have  the 
crown,  and  the  ignominious  pair  were  not  long  in  resigning 
themselves  to  their  imperious  master.  Signing  away  their  do- 
minion in  two  worlds,  they  accepted  in  return  large  pensions 
and  gilded  prison  cells  in  French  chateaux. 

As  coolly  as  if  he  were  appointing  prefects  to  govern  French 
departments,  Napoleon  in  1808  assigned  Joseph  to  be  King 


FORTUNE  TURNS  267 

of  Spain  and  Emperor  of  the  Two  Americas,  and  ordered 
Murat  to  mount  the  throne  of  Naples.  At  the  same  time,  as 
always  when  incorporating  a  new  country  in  his  empire,  he 
gave  Spain  the  boon  of  a  liberal  constitution  and  sound  guaran- 
tees of  a  government  infinitely  better  than  it  ever  had  known. 
To  his  astonishment  he  found  that  the  Spanish  people  cared 
much  more  for  their  pride  than  for  any  progress  he  could 
offer  them.  They  preferred  their  own  antiquated,  oppres- 
sive and  corrupt  government  to  any  modern  improvements 
introduced  by  a  foreigner.  Instantly  rising  in  a  frenzy 
of  indignation  at  the  insult  to  their  nation,  they  drew  their 
knives  and  cut  every  French  throat  that  lay  bare  to  their 
revengeful  hands. 

This  was  a  wholly  new  experience  for  Napoleon,  In  Italy 
and  EgA'pt  and  Poland  he  had  battled  only  with  the  alien  op- 
pressors of  the  population,  to  whom  he  presented  himself  as  a 
liberator.  In  Austria  and  Prussia  he  had  not  fought  the 
people,  but  only  a  stupid  and  selfish  aristocracy. 

When,  however,  he  accepted  the  challenge  of  the  popular  re- 
volt in  Spain  and  undertook  to  crush  a  people,  he  definitely 
ceased  to  be  the  champion,  and  became  the  enemy  of  democracy. 
In  the  picture  that  he  was  contemplating,  he  saw  himself  a 
second  Charlemagne  uniting  Europe  in  a  new  empire  of  the 
west.  But  in  the  ten  centuries  since  the  Carlovingian  Empire 
was  founded,  nations  had  risen  and  the  sentiment  of  patriotism 
had  become  a  mighty  force  among  men.  Napoleon  himself 
had  no  nation  and  had  grown  up  a  stranger  to  patriotism. 
By  a  strange  stroke  of  poetic  justice  he  had  left  his  subjugated 
Corsica,  had  conquered  its  conquerors  and  brought  the  con- 
tinent under  the  rule  of  an  islander.  His  army  was  a  medley 
of  nations  and  races;  his  camp  a  babel  of  tongues.  Italians 
guarded  his  eagles  on  the  dykes  of  the  North  Sea ;  Poles  bore 
them  through  the  passes  of  the  Pyrenees,  and  Spaniards 
patrolled  the  sandy  bounds  of  his  dominion  by  the  Baltic. 

He  viewed  with  contempt  the  savage  fury  of  the  undisci- 
plined rabble  that  had  set  all  Spain  ablaze.  "Be  gay,"  he 
commanded  King  Joseph,  "and  do  not  let  yourself  be  trou- 
bled."    But  poor  Joseph  could  not  fairly  be  expected  to  dis- 


268     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

play  much  gaiety  as  he  found  himself  elevated  on  the  point  of 
a  bayonet  and  enthroned  on  a  keg  of  gunpowder.  Within  nine 
days  of  his  entry  into  his  new  capital,  the  imported  King  was 
in  flight  northward  from  the  rebellious  hordes  that  overran 
his  kingdom. 

Had  that  misfortune  come  singly  it  would  have  been  bad 
enough,  but  it  was  accompanied  by  a  disaster  that  stunned  the 
Emperor  and  left  him  speechless  with  grief  and  rage.  A 
French  army  under  General  Dupont  had  been  caught  between 
two  fires  at  Baylen,  in  Andalusia,  and  nearly  20,000  French- 
men had  laid  down  their  arms  to  the  Spanish  mobs  that 
hemmed  them  in. 

The  Emperor  was  in  southern  France  when  he  was  struck 
by  that  ' '  blow  of  fate, "  as  he  called  it.  Through  three  hours 
of  silent  agony  he  held  the  direful  news  in  his  breast,  without 
lisping  a  hint  of  it,  until  at  last  plaintive  cries  escaped  his  lips. 

For  the  first  time  an  army  of  Napoleon  had  surrendered. 
For  the  first  time  his  imperial  eagles,  bestowed  on  his  bat- 
talions by  his  own  hands,  were  captives  in  the  hands  of  an 
enemy.  As  if  promptly  to  point  the  prophecy  which  that 
event  held,  another  of  his  armies  surrendered  in  the  following 
month  to  Sir  Arthur  Wellesley,  in  the  first  battle  between  a 
French  force  and  the  destined  victor  of  Waterloo. 

The  future  Duke  of  Wellington  had  landed  an  English  army 
on  the  Portuguese  coast  to  reopen  the  harbour  of  Lisbon  and 
drive  the  French  from  the  country.  Junot  had  marched  out 
from  Lisbon  to  repel  him  with  an  inferior  force.  Then  for  the 
first  time  since  Yorktown,  an  English  and  a  French  array  faced 
each  other  in  battle,  and  the  English  won.  The  French  capit- 
ulated and  agreed  to  abandon  their  occupation  of  Portugal. 

While  the  Spaniards  were  placing  the  captured  eagles  of 
Napoleon  among  the  treasures  in  the  cathedral  of  Seville,  the 
amazing  report  of  their  victory  and  the  English  victory  in 
Portugal  ran  throughout  Europe  and  awakened  a  new  hope  in 
the  foes  of  the  Empire  everywhere.  Austria  grew  bolder  and 
more  urgent  in  the  war  preparations  which  she  had  been  mak- 
ing ever  since  Austerlitz. 

To  eclipse  the  thoughts  of  his  recent  defeats  and  revive  the 


FORTUNE  TURNS  269 

memories  of  his  victories,  to  convince  the  Hapsburgs  and 
all  other  restless  elements  that  the  compact  of  Tilsit  still 
united  the  two  greatest  powers  of  Europe,  Napoleon  in- 
vited his  ally,  the  Czar,  to  meet  him  in  Germany.  This  second 
meeting  of  the  Emperors  took  place  in  the  early  autumn  of 
1808  at  Erfurt,  where  Napoleon  and  Alexander  played  Damon 
and  Pythias  before  a  retinue  of  four  kings  and  a  score  of 
princes  and  a  dozen  dukes,  who  humbly  waited  upon  their  im- 
perial majesties. 

Having  fortified  the  Franco-Russian  alliance,  Napoleon 
turned  to  face  the  Spanish  mobs.  Leaving  Paris  in  the  im- 
perial state  that  now  marked  his  going  to  war,  fresh  horses, 
sent  on  ahead,  awaited  him  at  each  nine  or  ten  mile  stage  of 
the  journey.  Berthier  sat  beside  him  in  the  great  lumbering 
coach,  with  iron  tires  almost  as  broad  as  an  automobile's.  In 
front  of  the  Emperor's  seat,  which  at  night  was  converted  into 
a  bed  on  which  he  could  lie  at  full  length,  was  a  door  that 
could  be  let  down  and  employed  as  a  table,  while  behind  it  were 
the  drawers  and  pigeonholes  of  a  complete  office  desk. 

Duroc,  grand  marshal  of  the  palace  in  charge  of  all  the 
travelling  arrangements,  galloped  on  one  side  of  the  carriage. 
On  the  other  side  rode  Caulaincourt,  master  of  the  horse, 
with  the  maps  which  must  always  be  at  the  Emperor's  call. 
The  horses  of  a  score  of  aides-de-camp  and  orderlies  pranced 
about  the  vehicle,  with  four  pages  mounted  behind  and  on  top 
of  it. 

At  the  rear  right  wheel  Roustan,  the  mameluke,  always  rode, 
with  a  luncheon  ever  ready  to  be  served.  Beside  the  opposite 
wheel  rode  two  mounted  chasseurs  carrying  portfolios  filled 
with  papers.  Equerries  and  grooms  and  the  Emperor's  per- 
sonal stud  of  eight  or  ten  led  horses  followed.  The  escort  con- 
sisted of  a  detachment  of  chasseurs  of  the  Guard  and  whenever 
and  wherever  the  Emperor  set  foot  four  of  them  with  drawn 
sabres  surrounded  him  in  a  square,  nimbly  jumping  this  way 
and  that  before  and  behind  him  as  he  walked  about. 

On  a  melancholy  day  early  in  November  of  1808  this  caval- 
cade passed  into  the  sombre  land  of  the  Spaniards,  where  Na- 
poleon took  command  of  a  superb  army  of  more  than  200,000 


270     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

troops  to  confront  170,000  Spaniards  and  British.  For  Eng- 
land had  now  made  common  cause  with  the  revolting  Spanish. 

As  the  Emperor  sped  toward  Madrid,  he  drove  a  wedge  be- 
tween the  wings  of  the  enemy 's  army.  He  left  the  wings  un- 
wounded,  however,  and  in  condition  to  unite  and  flap  together 
again.  Meanwhile  no  serious  resistance  was  offered  to  his  ad- 
vance. The  nation  parted,  to  let  the  invader  pass,  as  a  sea 
parts  at  the  prow  of  a  ship,  but  only  to  close  in  when  he  was 
gone  and  leave  no  trace  of  his  passage. 

Entering  the  Spanish  capital  in  less  than  four  weeks  from 
the  opening  of  the  campaign,  he  patted  the  mane  of  one  of  the 
white  marble  lions  that  guard  the  grand  stairway  in  the  royal 
palace  and  exulted,  "I  possess  you  at  last,  the  Spain  I  desire  !" 
But  all  his  possessions  in  Spain  were  limited  to  mere  symbols  of 
power,  like  those  lions  of  the  stairway.  He  had  conquered 
roads,  and  castles,  and  palaces,  but  he  had  not  subdued  the 
people  anywhere. 

At  the  fall  of  their  city,  the  inhabitants  of  Madrid  haughtily 
drew  their  cloaks  about  them  and  in  silent  disdain  received 
the  conqueror.  In  vain  he  proffered  his  unwilling  subjects  the 
solid  advantages  of  modern  institutions  and  laws.  The  Span- 
ish people  would  accept  nothing  from  his  hand.  He  opened 
the  theatres  in  order  to  reawaken  the  gaiety  of  Madrid.  The 
Spaniards  would  not  enter  them.  For  days  hardly  a  woman 
appeared  in  the  streets,  and  the  gallant  invaders  sighed  in  vain 
even  for  a  glimpse  of  a  pair  of  black  eyes  behind  the  grilled 
gates  of  the  houses.  The  Emperor  heralded  abroad  his  appear- 
ance at  grand  reviews,  but  pride  overcame  curiosity  and  the 
people  refused  to  come  out  to  see  the  most  extraordinary  per- 
sonage of  modern  times. 

Napoleon  was  organising  at  Madrid  an  expedition  to  drive 
the  English  out  of  Portugal,  when  30,000  British,  under  Sir 
John  Moore,  crossed  the  Portuguese  frontier  to  drive  him  out 
of  Spain.  As  they  moved  straight  toward  his  communications, 
the  threat  at  once  diverted  him  from  his  Lisbon  campaign. 
Leaving  Madrid  in  mid-winter,  after  a  stay  of  three  weeks  in 
that  capital,  he  began  the  pursuit  of  j\Ioore.  Afoot  in  a  storm 
of  hail  and  sleet  he  led  his  army  over  the  Sierra  de  Guadar- 


FORTUNE  TURNS  271 

rama,  whose  peaks  divide  old  Castille  from  new.  But  in  spite 
of  his  swift  marches  the  English  escaped  him  and  were  well 
along  in  their  retreat  to  Corunna. 

Already  a  fresh  alarm  about  Austria  had  recalled  him  from 
his  dreams  of  "planting  his  eagles  on  the  towers  of  Lisbon," 
Quickly  turning  to  hurl  himself  against  the  walls  of  Vienna, 
1800  miles  away,  he  abandoned  to  his  marshals  the  war  on  the 
peninsula.  General  Savary  with  difficulty  kept  ahead  of  his 
master,  but  Duroc  and  Roustan  lagged  in  the  dust,  while  the 
Emperor,  with  a  solitary  aide-de-camp  at  his  side,  spurred  on 
from  relay  to  relay  of  horses  in  his  race  to  Paris. 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 
HIS  LAST  VICTORY 

1809     AGE  39-40 

AS  Napoleon  galloped  back  to  Paris  on  lathered  horses, 
the  flames  of  the  Spanish  revolution,  bursting  forth 
with  new  fury,  lit  up  the  southern  sky  behind  him, 
while  the  camp  fires  of  the  Austrians  blazed  before  him  in  the 
northern  sky.  He  was  caught  between  two  great  wars,  and 
must  now  take  up  arms  against  that  sea  of  troubles  whereon 
he  was  to  battle  for  six  years  with  the  ever-rising  waves  of 
disaster  which  at  last  were  to  dash  him  upon  the  rock  of  St. 
Helena. 

At  four  o'clock  of  an  April  morning  in  1809,  the  Emperor, 
with  Josephine  beside  him  in  his  coach,  started  for  the  front 
to  enter  upon  his  last  victorious  campaign.  After  leaving  the 
Empress  at  Strasburg  and  making  calls  on  two  kings  along  the 
way,  he  arrived  at  the  headquarters  of  his  army  in  ninety- 
seven  hours.  The  distance  from  Paris  by  rail  is  about  500 
miles,  and  the  time  by  express  train  to-day  is  twenty  hours. 

Napoleon  instantly  grasped  the  reins,  and  in  an  hour  his 
couriers  were  spurring  their  horses  in  every  direction  with 
orders  designed  to  unite  the  army  against  the  Austrian  forces. 
"Activity!"  "Activity!"  "Rapidity!"  he  scrawled  in  a 
postscript  to  Massena.  The  hills  and  valleys  everywhere  rang 
with  salvos  announcing  to  the  soldiers  that  the  Great  Captain 
had  come. 

There  followed  one  of  the  most  brilliant  weeks  in  his  mili- 
tary life.  After  fighting  four  or  five  battles  in  as  many  days, 
he  stood  at  the  brink  of  the  moat  around  the  mediseval  walls 
of  Ratisbon,  when  he  was  struck  in  the  right  heel  by  a  long- 
range  Tyrolean  rifle.     Although  the  ball  "scarcely  razed  the 

272 


HIS  LAST  VICTORY  273 

tendon  Achilles,"  he  assured  Josephine  in  a  letter,  it  inflicted 
a  painful  sting. 

As  he  sat  on  a  drum,  while  a  surgeon  dressed  the  wound, 
thousands  of  his  soldiers  broke  ranks  and  surrounded  him,  in- 
different to  the  Austrian  guns,  which  were  pelting  the  excited 
assemblage.  To  disperse  the  group  and  reassure  the  army,  he 
mounted  his  horse  and  rode  down  the  lines  on  waves  of  cheers. 
Pausing  before  each  command,  he  called  upon  the  commanders 
to  name  the  men  under  them  deserving  of  special  honours. 
Privates  and  corporals  and  sergeants  were  transformed  there 
on  the  field  into  knights  of  the  Empire  and  chevaliers  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour.  That  extraordinary  review  under  fire 
having  been  finished,  he  ordered  the  scaling  ladders  against 
the  old  town  wall  and  returned  to  his  hillock,  where  as  Brown- 
ing portrays  him 

A  mile  or  so  away  on  a  little  moimd, 
Napoleon  stood  on  our  storming  day, 

With   neck   outthrust,   you   fancy   how; 
Legs  wide,  arms  locked  behind 

As  if  to  balance  the  prone  brow 
Oppressive  with  his  mind. 

One  week  after  the  Emperor's  arrival  at  headquarters,  he 
was  within  the  fortress  walls  of  Ratisbon,  and  the  Austrian 
Archduke  Charles  was  running  off  into  the  wilds  of  Bohemia. 
The  victorious  invaders  poured  down  the  valley  in  a  torrent 
that  overwhelmed  all  the  strongholds  on  the  road  to  Vienna. 
While  Napoleon  was  riding  with  Berthier  and  Lannes  one  day, 
he  saw  the  towers  of  the  old  castle  of  Dirnstein  reaching  sky- 
ward from  its  rock  beside  the  Danube.  As  he  pointed  to  the 
towers,  he  told  his  companions  the  story  of  an  emperor  that 
had  treacherously  imprisoned  within  those  castle  walls,  Rich- 
ard Coeur  de  Lion,  who,  like  themselves,  had  fought  at  the 
gate  of  Acre. 

' '  How  far  removed  are  we  now  from  those  barbarous  times  ! ' ' 
he  exclaimed.  "I  have  had  princes,  kings,  and  emperors  in 
my  power,  and,  far  from  taking  away  their  liberty,  I  have  not 
exacted  a  single  sacrifice  of  their  honour.  AVould  they  do  as 
much  for  me?"     The  party  rode  on  in  silence,  the  Emperor's 


274     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

gaze  still  fixed  upon  the  castled  ruin.  But  in  his  reverie  he 
probably  did  not  dream  how  much  less  kind  fate  could  be, 
even  in  a  later  time,  than  it  was  to  Richard  the  captive  of 
Dirnstein ! 

At  the  opening  of  the  campaign,  the  Emperor  Francis  with 
his  court  had  journeyed  to  the  front  to  enjoy  the  confidently 
expected  triumph  of  his  arms  over  the  conqueror  of  Auster- 
litz.  Even  as  the  army  fell  back  in  the  first  days,  misleading 
reports  of  victories  had  stimulated  the  spirits  of  the  Viennese 
and  of  the  imperial  family  at  the  capital. 

When  she  heard  the  false  news  of  victory,  the  young  Arch- 
duchess Marie  Louise,  who  had  already  been  twice  driven  from 
her  home  by  Napoleon,  wrote  this  pathetic  and  childish  letter  to 
her  father,  the  Emperor: 

We  have  heard  with  delight  that  Napoleon  was  present  at  the  great 
battle  which  the  French  lost.  May  he  lose  his  head  as  well!  There 
are  a  great  many  prophecies  about  bis  speedy  end,  and  people  say 
that  the  Apocalypse  applies  to  him.  They  say  he  is  going  to  die 
this  year  at  Cologne  in  an  inn  called  the  Red  Crawfish.  I  do  not 
attach  much  importance  to  these  prophecies,  but  how  glad  I  should 
be  to  see  them  come  true ! 

Napoleon  had  announced  to  his  army  at  Ratisbon  that  he 
would  be  in  Vienna  in  a  month.  In  less  than  three  weeks  he  was 
dating  his  orders  from  Sehonbrunn,  the  palace  of  the  Haps- 
burgs.  There  he  strolled  in  the  leafy  lanes,  for  which  Marie 
Louise  was  sighing  in  her  banishment,  and  he  slept  in  the  very 
room  where  in  the  yet  veiled  future  her  son  and  his  was  to 
languish  and  die  in  exile. 

He  was  once  more  master  of  the  Austrian  capital,  as  in  1805. 
No  sooner  had  he  entered  the  city  than  he  opened  a  campaign 
that  remains  unique  in  the  history  of  warfare.  He  was  still 
confronted  by  the  army  of  the  Archduke  Charles.  Between 
them  flowed  the  Danube,  the  bridges  over  which  had  been 
destroyed  by  the  Austrians  as  they  evacuated  the  city. 

The  mountainous  banks  of  the  upper  Danube,  rising  almost 
sheer  500  and  1000  feet  on  either  side,  often  shut  it  in  a  narrow 
bed.     Those  cliff-like  walls  give  way  as  the  river  approaches 


HIS  LAST  VICTORY  275 

Vienna,  and  its  pent  up  waters  burst  upon  and  spread  over  a 
great  plain,  the  Marchfield,  forming  there  a  remarkable  tangle 
of  islands.  Seizing  upon  those  islands  as  stepping  stones, 
Napoleon,  with  his  customary  rapidity,  threw  bridges  of  boats 
from  island  to  island  a  few  miles  below  the  city.  In  hardly 
more  than  a  week  after  his  capture  of  Vienna,  he  began  to 
march  his  army  across  to  the  northern  bank. 

Although  within  sight  of  the  Byzantine  domes  and  towers 
of  the  great  city  of  Vienna,  which  has  grown  from  a  popula- 
tion of  200,000  to  more  than  2,000,000,  the  historic  plain  of 
the  Marchfield  remains  to-day,  with  the  exception  of  a  street 
car  line,  the  same  simple,  quiet  country  side  that  it  was  when 
the  battle  of  the  empires  burst  upon  it  and  broke  its  stillness  in 
the  first  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century.  The  wide,  open  field 
lying  in  front  of  the  desolate  wooded  island  of  Lobau  is  even 
now  dedicated  to  military  use,  but  not  to  a  combat  of  foot  and 
horse,  as  in  1809.  The  big,  ungainly  hangar  of  the  Austrian 
army  rises  in  the  meadow,  and  out  of  its  bam-like  door  such 
chariots  of  war  sail  into  the  air  as  would  have  struck  Napoleon 
dumb  with  amazement. 

Beyond  that  "flugfeld"  by  the  Danube,  and  a  mile  or  more 
from  Lobau,  two  little  stone  villages  dot  the  plain.  The  one 
on  the  right  is  Essling  and  the  one  on  the  left  Aspern.  Na- 
poleon ordered  his  advancing  forces  to  seize  those  hamlets  and 
convert  their  stone  cottages  and  stone  walls  into  forts. 

The  Archduke  Charles  stood  on  the  crown  of  the  Bisamberg, 
which  lifts  itself  like  a  grandstand  at  the  upper  end  of  the 
Marchfield,  when  he  saw  his  audacious  antagonist  thus  cast 
the  gauntlet  at  his  feet.  Charles  eagerly  accepted  the  bold 
challenge  of  an  army  divided  by  a  river. 

Only  30,000  French  had  crossed,  when  the  Archduke  de- 
scended the  plain  in  five  columns  and  hurled  80,000  Austrians 
upon  their  left  and  right  wings  at  Aspern  and  Essling.  Na- 
poleon sat  in  the  brickyard  at  Essling  while  iMarshal  Lannes 
beat  off  the  storm  of  battle  which  beset  that  town.  Six  times 
in  that  May  afternoon,  Aspern  was  tossed  back  and  forth  like 
a  ball. 

When  night  fell,  the  French  and  the  Austrians  were  clinched 


276  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in  the  churchj^ard  square  of  Aspem  and  only  broke  away 
to  bivouac,  leaving  their  outposts  at  opposite  ends  of  the  vil- 
lage, to  glare  at  one  another  around  the  street  corners.  Na- 
poleon himself  lay  through  the  night  in  the  grass  by  the  bridge, 
urging  on  the  reinforcements  from  the  other  side  of  the  river. 
Once  the  bridge  broke  under  the  pressure  of  the  swiftening 
current,  but  the  rickety  structure  was  fastened  together  again. 

When,  at  two  o'clock  in  the  morning,  Charles'  batteries 
suddenly  belched  fire  in  the  darkness  and  poured  their  lava 
streams  upon  Massena  's  command  in  Aspern,  there  were  in  all 
only  55,000  French  to  face  him.  Having  received  word  that 
Davout,  the  lion  of  Auerstadt  and  Eckmlihl,  was  crossing  to 
his  assistance,  Napoleon  ordered  Lannes  and  Bessieres  to  throw 
themselves  upon  the  Austrian  centre. 

Seeing  his  line  between  the  villages  breaking  under  the  blow, 
Charles  seized  an  Austrian  flag  and,  with  reckless  daring, 
dashed  forth  beneath  its  waving  folds,  and  rallied  and  led 
his  troops  forward.  As  so  often  happened  in  the  old  warfare, 
the  tide  of  a  great  battle  was  turned  by  one  man,  and  the 
Archduke's  gallantry  at  that  moment  is  celebrated  in  a  spirited 
statue  which  stands  in  the  centre  of  Vienna. 

While  Napoleon  was  exerting  himself  to  steady  his  lines  as 
they  fell  back,  he  received  the  appalling  news  that  the  Danube 
had  risen  in  his  rear.  Nature  had  cut  his  communications. 
The  mighty  river  was  booming  with  a  spring  freshet,  which, 
sweeping  trees  and  boats  from  its  banks,  hurled  them  against 
the  main  pontoon  of  the  French,  between  Lobau  and  the 
Vienna  shore.  As  this  great  bridge  was  smashed  and  swept 
away  in  the  thunderous  torrent,  Davout  with  his  army, 
stood  by  the  opposite  shore  a  helpless  spectator  of  his  Em- 
peror's desperate  plight.  Even  the  ammunition  supplies  were 
cut  off,  for  nothing  could  be  ferried  over  the  swollen  waters. 

Napoleon  was  compelled  to  sound  retreat  for  the  first  time 
since  he  was  turned  back  from  the  walls  of  Acre.  And  now 
a  flood  threatened  him  with  greater  perils  than  he  met  in 
the  arid  desert.  Even  if  the  frail,  creaking  bridge  from  the 
Aspern  shore  to  Lobau  withstood  the  bufi'ets  of  the  angry 
river,  he  still  must  beat  off  the  victorious  foe  the  remainder 


HIS  LAST  VICTORY  277 

of  the  morning  and  throughout  the  afternoon,  in  order  to  get 
his  tens  of  thousands  of  men  over  to  the  island  under  cover  of 
darkness. 

Massena,  afoot  and  sword  in  hand,  held  back  the  Austrians 
all  day  at  the  Aspern  church,  and  the  statue  of  a  lion  which 
now  stands  in  the  churchyard  even  more  fittingly  expresses  his 
defence  than  the  Austrian  victory  which  it  was  erected  to 
commemorate.  Meanwhile  Lannes  faced  the  Austrian  centre 
and  parried  its  blows  until  he  had  only  300  grenadiers.  His 
horses  were  dead  and  his  cartridges  gone.  But  in  a  message 
to  the  Emperor  he  gave  his  pledge,  "I  will  hold  out  to  the 
last."  And  he  left  the  field  only  when  borne  off  dying.  A 
cannon  ball  rolling  along  the  ground  had  given  him  his  thir- 
teenth battle  wound  and  carried  away  both  legs. 

When  the  sun  had  gone  down  at  last  on  a  day  of  frightful 
sacrifices,  the  retreat  to  Lobau  was  made  in  the  shadow  of 
night.  In  thirty  hours  of  fighting,  the  Austrians  had  lost  more 
than  20,000  men,  and  the  French  quite  as  many  from  their 
smaller  force. 

Soon  secret  messengers  were  speeding  throughout  the  Em- 
pire and  whispering  the  news  that  the  child  of  destiny  had 
received  a  parental  chastisement,  that  the  favourite  of  for- 
tune was  not  invincible.  Two  of  his  armies  had  surrendered 
within  a  year,  and  now  even  he  himself  had  been  defeated. 
Great,  if  silent,  was  the  rejoicing  in  Germany  and  wherever 
an  imperial  eagle  perched  above  a  subjugated  people. 

Napoleon,  however,  was  moving  with  no  less  decision  and 
vigour  to  repair  a  defeat  than  if  he  were  taking  measures  to 
complete  a  victory.  He  at  once  set  his  army  to  the  task  of 
conquering  the  Danube,  while  he  summoned  reinforcements 
from  every  quarter.  At  the  end  of  six  arduous  wonder- 
working weeks,  he  had  200,000  soldiers  at  Vienna  and  was 
ready  to  make  good  his  boast  that  "the  Danube  exists  no 
more. ' ' 

A  bridge  of  sixty  arches  and  wide  enough  for  three  carriages 
to  pass  abreast  had  been  completed  to  Lobau ;  another  bridge 
eight  feet  wide  had  been  constructed  on  piles,  and  a  third 
bridge,  formed  of  boats,  was  in  readiness.     The  army  thus  on 


278  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

July  1  could  advance  in  three  columns,  and  on  that  day  the 
Emperor  himself  pitched  his  tent  on  the  ^eat  island.  Thence, 
dressed  as  sergeants,  he  and  Marshal  INIassena  personally  recon- 
noitred the  northern  bank  of  the  river,  under  the  eyes  of 
Austrian  sentries,  who,  seeing  them  take  off  their  coats,  were 
not  unkind  enough  to  molest  two  common  soldiers  out  for  a 
bath. 

The  next  deception  perpetrated  upon  the  enemy  was  a  more 
serious  one.  A  bridge  was  thrown  across  from  Lobau  on  the 
site  of  the  old  bridge  in  the  Aspern-Essling  fight.  The  Arch- 
duke Charles,  therefore,  prepared  for  a  renewel  of  the  struggle 
on  the  same  lines  as  before.  But  in  two  hours  of  the  dark  and 
stormy  night  of  July  4,  six  pontoon  bridges  were  thrown  across 
from  the  farther  end  of  the  island  without  attracting  the  fire 
or  even  the  attention  of  the  foe. 

By  noon  of  July  5,  Napoleon  stood  on  the  Marchfield  again, 
but  this  time  with  180,000  men  behind  him  and  only  140,000 
Austrians  in  front  of  him.  Sweeping  around  Charles'  well 
constructed  entrenchments  about  Aspern,  he  aimed  his  blow 
straight  at  the  village  of  Wagram,  nearly  ten  miles  across  the 
plain  from  the  former  battlefield.  His  object  was  to  strike 
the  left  wing  of  the  Austrians  in  that  village  and  cut  off  an- 
other army  which  was  then  hurrying  to  the  aid  of  Charles. 

The  battle  did  not  begin  until  seven  in  the  evening.  Al- 
though ]\Iarshal  Bernadotte  with  his  German  troops  succeeded 
in  capturing  Wagram,  they  lost  it  in  a  few  minutes,  and  Na- 
poleon bivouacked  that  night  with  one  more  defeat  recorded 
against  him.  Still  he  was  up  at  break  of  day  and  the  real 
Battle  of  Wagram  was  in  full  fury  as  early  as  four  o  'clock. 

More  than  300,000  men  were  trampling  the  tall  wheat  of 
the  Marchfield  and  wrestling  for  the  possession  of  the  little 
cluster  of  stone  cottages  which  constituted  the  hamlet  of  Wag- 
ram. Fired  by  their  repeated  successes,  the  Austrians  at 
once  took  the  offensive  and  held  it  for  six  hours.  At  ten 
o'clock  they  saw  the  left  wing  of  the  French  army  crumpling 
and  opening  the  way  toward  the  bridges.  If  they  could  seize 
the  bridges,  a  fatal  blow  would  be  dealt  the  enemy's  lines. 

Napoleon  met  that  perilous  situation  not  only  by  strengthen- 


HIS  LAST  VICTORY  C279 

ing  his  left  wing,  but  also  by  bringing  up  100  guns  and  train- 
ing them  at  half-range  on  the  Austrian  centre.  The  effect  was 
the  same  as  a  heavy  blow  on  the  centre  of  the  human  anatomy. 
The  triumphant  Austrian  army  stopped,  winded.  Then  Na- 
poleon moved  forward  to  turn  Charles'  left  at  Wagram,  toward 
which  Davout  and  Macdonald  pushed  through  blazing  wheat 
fields,  where  all  who  fell  were  cremated  in  the  flames.  At  two 
o'clock,  Charles,  cut  off  from  hope  of  reinforcements,  was  in 
retreat  toward  the  north  country.  Once  more — and  for  the 
last-time — Napoleon  had  brought  to  a"  close  a  victor iojiscam- 
paign, ._  , 

The  Marchfield  was  strewn  with  the  bodies  of  nearly 
50,000  dead  and  wounded,  equally  divided  between  the  two 
armies.  Nearly  a  hundred  thousand  men  had  fallen  on  that 
little  plain  in  six  weeks  and  twenty  villages  had  been  wrecked, 
to  determine  which  of  two  nations  should  possess  distant  lands 
that  belonged  to  neither. 

Although  Napoleon  had  been  in  the  field  three  months,  he 
had  not,  as  in  other  campaigns,  overwhelmed  and  destroyed  the 
enemy.  He  was  content  to  accept  an  armistice  while  Charles' 
army  still  bore  aloft  the  banner  of  Austria. 

Fot  already  he  was  plunged  into  still  another  war,  with  a 
court  older  even  than  that  of  Vienna,  with  an  empire  far  wider 
than  that  of  the  Hapsburgs.  By  his  command,  the  soldiers  of 
King  Murat  had  entered  Rome,  planted  the  eagles  of  the  new 
CjEsar  on  the  Castle  of  St.  Angelo  and  drawn  up  a  battery 
before  the  door  of  the  Quirinal,  then  the  palace  of  Pope 
Pius  VII. 

To  control  the  ports  of  the  Papal  States  against  the  British, 
Napoleon  had  first  annexed  the  upper  states  to  the  kingdom  of 
Italy.  The  Papacy  still  refusing  to  join  the  continental  union 
against  England,  the  Emperor  next  swept  away  entirely  its 
temporal  sovereignty.  Thereupon  Pius  retorted  with  a  bull 
excommunicating  and  anathematising  all  who  took  part  in 
despoiling  the  Holy  See. 

While  the  hosts  of  Napoleon  and  Charles  were  sleeping  on 
their  arms  before  Vienna,  a  commander  of  gendarmerie  broke 
down  the  doors  and  stalked  into  the  Quirinal  on  the  night  of 


280  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

July  5-6,  where  the  Pope,  wearing  his  mozetta  and  stole,  re- 
signedly awaited  his  fate.  In  the  name  of  the  Emperor,  Pius 
was  commanded  to  renounce  his  temporal  sovereignty,  and, 
upon  his  refusal,  he  was  placed  under  arrest.  He  asked  only 
for  two  hours  in  which  to  prepare  for  his  departure ;  but  this 
respite  was  denied. 

Taking  with  him  nothing  but  his  breviary  and  his  crucifix, 
the  Pope  emerged  from  the  palace,  and  silently  blessed  the 
sleeping  city.  Then  stepping  into  the  coach  provided  for  him, 
its  doors  were  locked  and  his  imprisonment  had  begun.  When 
the  sun  rose  above  the  Sabine  Hills  and  gleamed  on  the  dome 
of  St.  Peter's,  the  heir  of  the  Fisherman  was  being  hurried 
away  in  his  prison  van  toward  his  captivity  at  Savona,  the 
Savona  from  which  Napoleon  himself  rode  out  one  moonlight 
night  to  burst  into  fame  on  the  heights  of  Montenotte.  Now 
it  was  to  become  a  station  on  his  path  to  St.  Helena. 

Although  the  Emperor  pointed  to  the  arrest  of  Pope  Boni- 
face and  Pope  Clement  VII  by  Philippe  le  Bel  and  Charles  V 
as  his  warrant,  the  Christian  world,  regardless  of  sect,  viewed 
his  carrying  off  of  Pius  as  the  most  unwarranted  of  his  acts. 
The  Papal  States,  it  is  true,  were  like  a  wedge  in  his  empire, 
cutting  off  the  kingdom  of  Naples  from  the  kingdom  of  Italy. 
But  he  had  already  annexed  those  states  of  the  church,  and 
his  arrest  of  the  aged  Pontiff  could  not  be  justified  on  the 
lowest  grounds  of  policy.  It  was  another  deed  that  merited 
the  cynic 's  censure  as  something  worse  than  a  crime — it  was  a 
blunder. 

Napoleon 's  negotiations  meanwhile  with  the  Emperor  Fran- 
cis dragged  their  slow  pace  through  the  summer.  He  had 
struck  off  a  spurious  issue  of  Austrian  bank  notes  amounting 
to  $60,000,000,  and  was  prepared  to  flood  and  bankrupt  the 
country  with  them  when,  in  October,  Francis  tardily  yielded 
to  his  terms.  To  ransom  his  capital,  the  Austrian  Emperor 
gave  up  territories  having  a  population  of  3,500,000  and  paid 
a  war  indemnity  of  $16,000,000,  besides  agreeing  to  the  hu- 
miliating condition  that  he  should  disband  half  his  army.  By 
this  latest  cession,  a  part  of  Austrian  Poland  was  transferred 
to  the  Grand  Duchy  of  Warsaw,  which  was  under  the  sov- 


HIS  LAST  VICTORY 


/^281 


ereignty  of  the  King  of  Saxony,  and  the  frontiers  of  the 
kingdoms  of  Bavaria  and  Italy  were  moved  closer  to  Vienna. 

The  day  after  the  agreement  was  made  a  mighty  explosion 
shook  Vienna  like  an  earthquake  and  left  its  walls  in  ruins. 
Not_§atisfied  with  the  reduction  of  the  Austrian  army,  Na- 
poleon had  ordered  that  the  Austrian  capital  be  dismantled. 
The  Viennese  were  greatly  outraged  by  the  blowing  up  of 
their  ramparts,  but  time  and  art  have  healed  the  wound.  For 
where  the  ugly  bastions  once  rose  and  encircled  the  town,  the 
Ring,  that  unique  and  beautiful  promenade,  now  winds  its 
noble  way,  and  is  become  the  proudest  boast  of  the  present-day 
Vienna. 

As. Napoleon  was  levelling  the  old  wall  of  Vienna,  a  new 
wall  was  being  raised  in  France.  Orders  had  come  from  him 
while  he  was  at  Schonbrunn  that  the  private  passage  between 
his  apartments  and  the  Empress'  in  the  palace  of  Fontaine- 
bleau  should  be  closed.  The  hammers  of  the  workmen  on  that 
partition  really  knelled  the  doom  of  Josephine. 

The  conquest  of  Europe  having  been  completed,  the  con- 
queror had  determined  at  last  to  divorce  his  wife  and  seek  in 
a  new  union  an  heir  to  perpetuate  his  empirg^,_  TJia-walls  of 
Vienna  still  lay  in  a  heap  four  montlis  after  Napoleon's  depar- 
tiirefrom  the  city,  when  Berthier,  Prince  of  Wagram,  climbed 
over  them  to  demand  from  the  Emperor  Francis  another  prize 
of  victory,  the  hand  of  his  daughter,  the  Archduchess  Marie 
Louise,  in  marriage  with  Napoleon. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV 

THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX 

SO]\IE  one  has  made  the  discovery  that  Shakespeare,  al- 
though he  had  15,000  words  in  his  vocabulary,  had  to 
repeat  the  term  ^lovg,  1500  times  in  the  course  of  his 
matchless  story  of  the  human  race.  Yet  that  magic  little  word, 
has  no  place  in  the  biography  of  Napoleon.  In  the  most 
crowded  life  that  ever  was  lived,  one  chapter  was  left  blank. 

Not  that  the  Great  Captain  was  a  misogynist.  It  is  really 
amazing  to  contemplate  the  time  and  attention  bestowed  upon 
womankind  by  this  busiest  man  the  world  ever  saw.  It  is 
hardly  necessary  to  hark  back  to  those  flaming  messages  to 
Josephine  from  that  first  Italian  campaign,  when  the  Little 
Corporal's  pulse  beat  higher  for  love  than  for  glory.  The 
flames  subsided,  it  is  true,  but  not  because  the  fire  burnt  out ; 
it  was  only  smothered.  When  the  bitter  cynic,  IMarmont,  tells 
us  that  "never  did  a  purer,  truer  or  more  exclusive  love  fill 
a  man's  heart  or  the  heart  of  so  extraordinary  a  man,"  we 
cannot  ask  for  a  more  credible  witness. 

No  woman  seems  to  have  touched  that  heart  without  leaving 
upon  it  an  ineffaceable  impression.  Mile.  Colombier,  the  little 
girl  who  picked  cherries  with  the  sublieutenant  at  Valence, 
needed  only  to  address  the  Emperor  to  have  him  open  wide 
his  cornucopia  above  her  no  longer  youthful  or  comely  head 
and  shower  upon  her  a  post  of  honour  as  lady  in  waiting  at 
the  court  of  Mme.  Mere  and  upon  her  husband  a  barony,  with 
comfortable  emoluments.  Another  maid  of  Valence,  whose 
smile  had  cast  a  faint  ray  upon  his  melancholy  path  by  the 
Rhone,  found  herself  elevated  to  the  station  of  lady  in  waiting 
to  the  Empress,  and  her  husband,  M.  de  Montalivet,  appointed 
a  member  of  the  ministry  and  a  count  of  the  Empire. 

He  bore  everything  from  and  did  everything  for  his  most 

282 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX  283 

faithless  and  useless  marshal  because  he  was  the  husband  of 
Desiree  Clary,  a  sweetheart  of  his  own  young  manhood,  saying, 
"Bernadotte  may  thank  his  marriage  for  his  baton,  his  prin- 
cipality of  Pontecorvo  and  the  crown  of  Sweden." 

Although  his  own  sisters  looked  upon  the  eagle,  which 
freakish  nature  had  smuggled  into  their  barnyard  brood,  as 
only  a  bird  to  be  plucked,  Pauline  alone  among  them  having 
the  slightest  emotion  for  him,  he  lavished  fondness  upon  his 
stepdaughter,  his  sister-in-law  and  upon  the  Beauharnais 
nieces  and  cousins,  "Hortense,"  he  said,  in  his  admiration 
of  Josephine's  daughter,  "forces  me  to  believe  in  virtue." 

When  Princess  Catherine  of  AViirtemberg  came  to  Paris  to 
marry  Jerome,  and  knelt  terrified  at  the  Emperor's  feet,  he 
picked  her  up,  gathered  the  av/kward  young  German  girl  in 
his  arms,  kissed  her,  and  with  his  gentleness  did  more  than  any 
of  the  women  of  the  court  to  place  her  at  ease.  In  the  Prin- 
cess Augusta  of  Bavaria,  wife  of  Prince  Eugene,  he  inspired 
the  fealty  of  a  daughter.  His  letter  of  instructions  to  the 
young  husband  discloses  a  sensible  domestic  code:  "You 
need  more  gaiety  in  your  house ;  it  is  necessary  for  your  wife 's 
happiness  and  for  your  health.  I  lead  the  life  that  you  lead, 
but  I  have  an  old  wife  who  can  amuse  herself  without  me,  and 
besides  I  have  more  to  do." 

The  Emperor's  indulgence  toward  Stephanie,  Aunt  Fanny 
Beauharnais'  granddaughter,  whom  he  adopted  as  his  own 
daughter  and  married  to  the  Prince  of  Baden,  made  that 
young  lady  the  spoiled  child  of  the  Empire.  When  Josephine 
brought  a  little  cousin  from  Martinique,  he  promptly  married 
her  to  the  Prince  d'Arenberg.  The  marriage  was  an  unhappy 
one  and  the  bride  ran  away  from  her  groom,  whereupon  the 
Emperor  gave  her  a  liberal  allowance  that  enabled  her  to  dis- 
pense with  an  unpleasant  husband, 

"Kind,  gentle,  persuasive  women"  were  his  choice,  and  such 
as  they  could  go  far  wnth  him.  He  would  brook  no  self  asser- 
tion from  them  on  any  point.  He  believed  in  training  wives 
in  the  way  they  should  walk.  To  the  Duchess  of  Dalmatia, 
wife  of  Marshal  Soult,  he  said:  "IMadam,  recollect  I  am  not 
your  husband.     If  I  were,  you  would  behave  very  differently. " 


284  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

He  would  have  no  sex  equality.  Women,  he  insisted,  should 
not  be  regarded  as  "men's  equals,  for  after  all  they  are  only 
the  machinery  for  turning  out  children."  He  would  have 
thanked  a  twentieth  century  emperor  for  his  alliterative  epi- 
gram on  the  limitation  of  women  to  "children,  church,  and 
cooking."  In  his  scheme  of  education  for  girls  there  were  to 
be  no  blue  stockings.  "Make  them  believers,  not  rea- 
soners, ' '  he  instructed  the  educators. 

An  amusing  dread  and  jealousy  of  the  influence  and  inde- 
pendence of  the  sex  are  betrayed  in  a  hundred  of  his  sayings. 
He  really  placed  women  on  a  level  with  the  English,  the  Aus- 
trians,  and  the  Russians  as  a  peril  to  his  mastery,  seeming  to 
look  upon  woman  as  a  competing  sovereignty  seated  upon  a 
rival  throne  and  disputing  with  him  for  the  dictatorship  of 
the  earth.  "A  minister  of  state,"  he  declared,  "should  never 
allow  a  woman  to  approach  his  cabinet."  He  would  establish 
a  quarantine  against  this  insidious  enemy  and  make  the  Em- 
pire exclusively  masculine. 

Such  a  segregation  of  the  sexes  as  he  proposed  is  nowhere 
more  absurdly  impossible  than  in  France,  where  the  great 
ladies  of  the  salons,  sharing  in  the  discussions,  the  intrigues, 
and  the  ambitions  of  philosophers  and  statesmen,  only  reflect 
the  fashions  of  the  women  of  the  peasantry,  who  have  an  equal 
part  with  the  men  in  the  counsels  of  the  cottage. 

Even  war  is  not  suffered  to  interrupt  the  comradeship  of  the 
sexes  in  France,  The  vivandiere,  or  cantine  woman,  dressed 
in  the  finery  and  mounted  on  the  horse  stolen  for  her  by  the 
soldiers,  with  her  keg  of  brandy  in  front  and  her  bologna 
sausage  and  cheese  all  around  her,  was  at  first  the  daughter 
and  next  the  sister  before  she  mellowed  into  the  mother  of  the 
regiment,  unless  indeed  she  married  in  the  meantime  and  be- 
came a  duchess,  like  Mme.  Sans  Gene,  or  a  baroness  or  a 
countess,  like  many  others  of  her  calling.  Her  tent  was  the 
club,  and  her  purse  the  bank  for  officers  and  soldiers  alike, 
while  she  braved  wounds  and  death  in  battle  by  carrying  re- 
freshments to  the  thirsty  and  famishing  firing  line. 

In  all  the  campaigns  of  Napoleon,  his  army  was  followed 
by  its  "love  escort."     Such  a  band  of  wives  and  children,  ac- 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX  285 

tresses,  dancers,  and  thousands  of  adventurous  women  as  never 
attended  any  other  than  a  French  military  organisation, 
brought  up  the  rear  of  the  Grand  Army  in  all  manner  of  wagons 
and  carts,  on  donkey  back  and  afoot.  AVith  the  fortitude  of 
grenadiers,  they  endured  the  heat  of  Spain  and  the  snows  of 
Russia,  and,  pausing  at  the  foot  of  a  tree  to  receive  a  call  from 
the  stork,  the  hardy  mothers,  with  their  babes  in  their  arms, 
quickly  overtook  the  advancing  columns. 

In  his  earlier  campaigns.  Napoleon  tried  hard  to  shake  off 
this  "love  escort."  But,  although  he  threatened  to  smudge 
the  faces  of  the  women,  they  defied  him,  and  there  is  no  record 
of  such  a  cruel  punishment  of  their  vanity.  He  took  all  pos- 
sible precautions  against  any  woman  accompanying  his  army 
to  Egypt,  but  many  slipped  aboard  his  ship  as  stowaways  or  in 
soldiers'  uniforms.  The  eternal  feminine  was  with  him  still 
in  his  retreat  from  Moscow,  where  women  who  had  grown 
families  in  his  camps  and  kept  step  with  his  legions  for  sixteen 
years,  followed  his  footprints  in  the  snow. 

Notwithstanding  he  had  failed  in  his  efforts  to  keep  them 
out  of  his  camp,  he  declared  that  "Women  shall  have  no  in- 
fluence at  my  court."  Affecting  a  brave  air,  he  exclaimed, 
"What  do  I  care  for  the  tittle-tattle  of  the  drawing  rooms? 
All  I  care  for  is  the  opinion  of  decent  peasants."  Yet  he 
made  a  detective  a  duke  to  reward  Fouche  's  diligence  and  skill 
in  providing  ears  for  the  walls  of  the  salons  of  Paris. 

It  was  a  pity  the  eagle  could  not  soar  above  the  idle  gossip 
in  the  boudoirs  of  the  old  nobility.  He  never  lost  his  sensitive- 
ness to  their  snubs.  Mme.  de  Narbonne,  although  the  Em- 
peror honoured  her  son  with  important  missions,  could  not  be 
brought  to  demean  herself  with  more  than  two  or  three  very 
perfunctory  appearances  at  court  each  year.  The  son,  how- 
ever, proved  himself  a  clever  diplomat  in  his  apologies,  when 
the  Emperor  said  in  a  grieved  tone,  "I  fear  your  mother  does 
not  like  me." 

"Sire,"  the  young  count  replied,  "my  mother  has  not  yet 
advanced  beyond  the  stage  of  admiration." 

Napoleon  recognised  the  queenship  of  women,  but  he  wished 
them  to  be  like  his  fellow  sovereigns  of  the  male  species,  satel- 


286  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

lites  revolving  around  his  own  planetary  body.  He  always 
stood  ready  to  be  their  protector  if  only  they  would  be  his 
allies. 

His  fatherly  care  over  the  "weaker  sex"  knew  almost  no 
bounds.  He  required  every  subprefect  in  France  to  make  a 
list  of  the  daughters  of  the  most  notable  families  within  his 
jurisdiction,  and  an  estimate  of  the  probable  inheritance  of 
each  girl.  At  that  time  he  contemplated  a  sort  of  card  index 
system,  under  which  he  would  betroth  to  his  poor  but  deserving 
civil  and  military  officers  all  the  heiresses  in  the  country  hav- 
ing yearly  incomes  of  $10,000  or  more.  Ever  eager  to  lend  a 
helping  hand  to  cupid,  he  married  one  of  Josephine 's  maids  to 
Constant,  his  valet,  and  giving  the  Duke  of  Gaeta,  his  minister 
of  finance,  two  years  in  which  to  marry,  he  thoughtfully  added, 
' '  If  you  wish,  I  will  arrange  it  for  you. ' ' 

In  his  ambition  to  dazzle  the  world  with  their  brilliance  and 
beauty,  he  surrounded  his  throne  with  women.  They  were, 
however,  to  be  merely  a  studiously  arranged  tableau,  and  he 
succeeded  in  making  his  court  the  most  splendid  and  the  most 
stupid  in  Europe. 

The  fashions  and  customs  of  women  not  only  interested  him 
personally  but  politically  as  well,  for  he  saw  their  possible 
usefulness  to  him  in  his  trade  war  with  England.  His  court 
was  commanded  to  give  up  the  use  of  imported  tea  and  sugar 
and  all  manner  of  British  fabrics.  "It  is  a  contest  of  life  and 
death  between  France  and  England,"  he  said,  "and  every 
French  teapot  and  sugar  basin  and  work  basket  must  be  em- 
ployed as  weapons  in  the  war."  Calling  fashion  to  his  side 
as  an  ally,  he  promoted  the  return  to  the  silks  of  Lyons  in 
the  styles  of  the  Empire  for  men  as  well  as  women,  and  laid 
a  ban  on  the  simpler  and  soberer  republican  garb  that  had 
come  into  favour  at  the  Revolution.  He  led  Parisian  dress- 
makers away  from  their  preference  for  goods  made  of  cotton, 
which  had  to  come  by  the  blockaded  sea,  to  linens  and  lawn 
woven  of  flax,  and  the  merino  sheep  of  Spain,  no  longer  yield- 
ing their  fleece  to  the  woollen  manufacturers  of  England,  gave 
the  mills  of  the  continent  a  monopoly  of  the  finest  wool  in  the 
world. 


WuMEX     UF     IHK     IMI'KKIAL     FaMU-Y 

1,  Betsy  Paterson  Bonaparte,  2,  Queen  Caroline  of  Naples,  3,  Prin- 
cess Pauline,  4,  Queen  Hortense  of  Holland,  ">,  Mme.  Mere,  6,  Grand 
Duchess  Elisa  of  Tuscany 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX  287 

Not  by  the  Emperor's  direction,  but  in  his  honour,  the 
fashion  makers  brought  out  Oriental  ideas  that  recalled  his 
campaign  in  the  east.  One  momentous  departure  was  made 
without  any  apparent  relation  to  him.  That  was  the  introduc- 
tion of  corsets  in  the  winter  of  1809. 

Napoleon's  weakness  for  the  sex  really  was  unmistakably 
betrayed  in  his  inordinate  interest  in  the  dress  and  toilet  of 
women,  which  he  criticised  as  if  he  were  inspecting  his  soldiers' 
uniforms.  '  *  Go  and  put  on  some  rouge,  madam,  you  look  like 
a  corpse!"  "How  red  your  elbows  are!"  "Good  God! 
They  told  me  you  were  pretty!"  "That  is  a  fine  mantle  of 
yours ;  I  must  have  seen  it  twenty  times ! "  "  Heavens,  but 
isn't  your  hair  red!" — these  are  among  the  reported  ejacula- 
tions at  which  the  women  of  the  court  circle  trembled  as  His 
Imperial  Majesty  made  his  rounds. 

He  never  planned  more  closely  the  operations  of  his  army  in 
the  field  than  he  planned  the  amusements  of  his  court.  He 
gave  great  theatrical  performances,  but  people  were  afraid  to 
applaud.  Young  girls  yawned  and  fell  asleep  in  the  heavy 
atmosphere  of  the  Tuileries.  It  palled  upon  even  the  Em- 
peror himself,  and  in  his  weariness  with  the  functions  of  his 
own  devising,  he  fidgeted  about  on  the  throne  at  the  splendid 
ceremonials. 

Paris  had  grown  dizzy  in  the  waltz,  which  Napoleon's  sol- 
diers had  discovered — or  rediscovered — in  the  Jena  campaign, 
when  the  conquering  army  saw  the  Germans  forgetting  their 
national  woes  in  its  dreamy  whirl.  Although  Napoleon's  old 
dancing  teacher  in  Valence  had  put  in  an  appearance  and  an 
application,  saying,  "Sire,  it  is  I  who  once  guided  your  steps," 
the  pupil  never  was  a  credit  to  his  instructor.  "When  the  Em- 
peror tried  his  awkward  feet  in  a  gavotte  at  Warsaw,  he  asked 
the  Countess  Potoeka  how  he  danced.  The  Countess'  reply  is 
a  model :  ' '  Sire,  for  a  great  man,  you  dance  perf ectl}^ ! ' '  The 
great  man,  however,  was  not  so  great  a  fool  and  he  knew 
better. 

Good  people  in  France  were  sorely  outraged  by  the  strange 
dance  from  Germany.  Although  it  invaded  even  the  frigid 
precincts  of  the  Tuileries,  the   Emperor  did  not  shock  the 


288  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF.  NAPOLEON 

prudes  by  taking  it  up,  for  whenever  he  tried  to  waltz,  that 
marvellous  head  of  his  grew  dizzy  and  lost  its  balance. 

To  give  his  people  a  change  of  scene,  Napoleon  at  stated 
times  transferred  his  court  to  country  palaces,  preferably  Fon- 
tainebleau,  which  Josephine  detested.  On  those  occasions,  the 
vast  pile  was  crowded  with  a  population  equal  to  that  of  a 
town,  requiring  as  many  as  1100  beds  to  be  made  in  the  chateau 
and  as  many  as  3000  covers  laid  at  dinner.  The  apartments 
were  assigned  to  the  guests  as  in  a  big  hotel,  while  the  duties 
of  entertaining  were  divided  among  the  members  of  the  im- 
perial family.  If  the  Emperor  gave  a  reception  this  evening, 
another  evening  was  marked  by  a  card  party  under  the  hos- 
pitality of  the  Empress,  while  on  other  evenings  there  were 
plays  or  musicales,  followed  by  balls  under  the  patronage  of 
the  princesses.  The  princes,  the  ministers,  the  grand  marshal, 
and  the  ladies  of  honour,  each  with  a  dining  table  in  his  or 
her  apartment — once  there  were  fifty-two  tables  to  be  served — 
gave  all  the  dinners,  and  thus  left  the  Emperor  at  liberty  to 
take  refuge  from  the  jaded  mob  of  courtiers  in  a  private 
dinner  with  the  Empress  and  whomsoever  else  he  chose. 

The  social  evolutions  of  each  day  were  scheduled  as  in  a 
military  training  camp.  Breakfast  over  at  eleven  o'clock,  the 
ladies  turned  to  tapestry  work ;  at  two  the  men  went  hunting, 
returning  at  eight  or  nine,  whereupon  the  Emperor  was  likely 
to  tap  his  watch  and  say,  "I  give  the  ladies  ten  minutes  to 
dress  for  dinner, ' '  Sometimes  a  great  levee  was  scheduled  for 
Sunday  morning,  which  obliged  all  those  from  Paris  to  travel 
most  of  the  night,  merely  to  stand  in  silence  against  the  wall  of 
a  corridor  at  Fontainebleau  while  the  Emperor  passed  as  in  a 
review  of  the  Guard,  perhaps  without  a  word  or  a  look,  after 
which  the  long  return  journey  to  the  city  began. 

Spite  of  his  tireless  efforts  to  give  his  court  a  good  time,  the 
Emperor  grieved:  "Is  it  not  strange!  I  brought  all  these 
people  out  to  Fontainebleau ;  I  wished  them  to  be  amused  and 
I  arranged  every  sort  of  pleasure.  Yet  here  they  are,  with 
long  faces,  all  looking  bored  and  tired." 

Talleyrand  explained,  with  the  candour  which  the  Emperor 
permitted  him  in  the  privacy  of  the  cabinet,  ' '  Sire,  that  is  be- 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX  289 

cause  pleasure  cannot  be  summoned  at  the  tap  of  a  drum. 
Your  Majesty  always  seems  to  say  to  us,  'Come,  ladies  and 
gentlemen,  forward,  march!'  " 

One  night  at  Fontainebleau,  as  the  imperial  party  was  com- 
ing from  a  production  of  the  ' '  Marriage  of  Figaro, ' '  the  wife 
of  Marshal  Lannes,  the  Duchess  of  Montebello,  sighed :  "To 
think  that  once  I  let  myself  be  almost  trampled  and  smothered 
to  see  that  play,  and  now  I  find  nothing  amusing  in  it ! "  Na- 
poleon replied,  ' '  That  is  because  then  you  were  in  the  pit,  and 
now  you  are  in  a  box ! ' ' 

Dreary  as  the  court  of  the  Empire  must  have  been,  it  had  the 
then  rare  merit  of  apparent  cleanliness,  at  least.  It  is  true 
that  Napoleon,  when  he  assumed  the  crown  assumed  at  the 
same  time  the  ancient  prerogative  of  monarchs  to  be  a  moral 
law  unto  himself.  It  is  true,  he  proclaimed,  "I  stand  apart 
from  other  men;  I  accept  no  one's  conditions!"  Nevertheless 
he  continued  to  pay  virtue  the  tribute  of  not  openly  adopting 
the  now  incredibly  low  standards  which  generally  prevailed 
among  royalty  in  a  time  when  the  palaces  of  Europe  were 
houses  of  shame,  and  when  there  was  not  yet  a  democratic 
public  opinion  to  restrain  princes  and  princesses  and  compel 
them  to  seem  as  decent  as  common  people. 

It  was  the  obscene  age  when  that  obese  debauchee,  George  IV 
of  England,  then  Prince  of  Wales,  typified  monarchial  morals 
and  reigned  as  "the  first  gentleman  of  Europe."  The  Hohen- 
zollerns  were  as  abandoned  a  lot  as  any  about  a  throne  when 
Louise  married  into  the  family  and  united  her  homely  virtues 
with  those  of  Frederick  ^Yilliam  to  lift  the  court  of  Berlin  out 
of  the  mire.  Czar  Alexander  was  altogether  worthy  of  his 
grandmother  who  brought  him  up,  the  naughty  Catherine. 

If  Napoleon  did  not  surpass  the  morals  of  his  fellow- 
sovereigns  he  was  not  guilty  of  their  brazen  affronts  to  the 
moral  sensibilities  of  his  subjects,  but  furtively  tread  the  prim- 
rose path  at  double  quick.  He  broke  no  lance,  like  Henry  II, 
for  a  Diane  de  Poitiers;  in  the  Empire,  France  saw  no  Val- 
liere,  no  Montespan,  no  Maintenon  successively  playing  the 
political  boss  with  a  Louis  XIY;  saw  no  Pompadour  wast- 
ing the  substance  of  the  people  in  riotous  living  with  a  Louis 


290     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

XV ;  nor  a  Barry  throwing  state  papers  in  the  fire  and  mocking 
the  interests  of  the  nation. 

AMiile  Napoleon  was  on  the  German  campaign  in  the  winter 
of  1806,  his  first  son  was  borne  him  in  Paris  by  Eleonore — 
Eleonore  Revel — and  through  seventy-five  years  of  a  worthless, 
rascally  life,  the  Count  de  Leon  carried  the  certificate  of  his 
paternal  origin  stamped  on  his  face,  which  he  proudly  boasted 
as  his  ''glorious  resemblance,"  The  Emperor  appointed  his 
secretary,  the  Baron  de  Meneval,  to  be  one  of  the  child's 
guardians,  and  made  liberal  provisions  for  the  boy  before  his 
final  remembrance  of  him  in  his  will. 

The  other  son,  who  was  born  in  1810,  became,  as  Count 
Walewski,  a  distinguished  statesman  of  the  Second  Empire, 
serving  under  Napoleon  III  as  ambassador  to  London,  minister 
of  foreign  afi^airs,  minister  of  state,  and  as  president  of  the 
corps  legislatif  until  his  death  in  1868.  The  Count's  mother, 
the  only  well-defined  figure  among  the  pathetic  shades  in  the 
background  of  Napoleon,  was  the  beautiful  twenty-two-year- 
old  wife  of  an  old  Polish  noble  when,  in  the  enthusiastic  emo- 
tion that  swept  her  unhappy  Poland  at  its  liberation  from 
Prussia,  she  smiled  upon  the  liberator  of  her  people  at  Warsaw, 
in  the  winter  of  1806-07.  To  this  day  the  Poles  cherish  her 
memory  as  one  who  gave  her  love  for  her  country.  Even  her 
aged  husband  and  his  family  appear  to  have  been  content  to 
see  the  beautiful  patriot  gain  the  confidence  of  the  master  of 
their  nation's  destiny.  For  M.  "Walewski 's  sisters  were  her 
chaperones  when  she  took  up  her  residence  in  Paris,  where 
she  dwelt  in  the  deepest  seclusion. 

It  is  not  clearly  written  in  history  that  the  most  brilliant 
man  in  its  pages,  with  grace  on  his  brow,  the  front  of  Jove  and 
the  eye  of  ^lars,  ever  won  the  love  of  any  woman.  Yet  the 
fault  may  not  have  been  so  much  in  the  man  as  in  his  star, 
which  forever  lured  him  from  home-felt  pleasures  and  gentle 
scenes,  * '  Grand,  gloomy,  and  peculiar,  he  sat  upon  the  throne 
a  sceptred  hermit,  wrapped  in  the  solitude  of  his  own  orig- 
inality."  Fortune  shed  upon  him  the  glory  of  victory  and 
power,  and  showered  upon  him  sceptres  and  crowns,  but  she 
withheld  a  blessing  common  to  men,  great  and  small,  worthy 


THE  UNCONQUERED  SEX  291 

and  unworthy — the  pure,  unselfish  love  of  two  good  women,  a 
mother  and  a  wife. 

Letizia  Bonaparte,  with  "the  head  of  a  man  on  the  shoulders 
of  a  woman,"  was  the  stern  and  noble  mother  bird  of  an  eagle, 
but  her  virtuous  and  dutiful  breast  was  no  fountain  of  affec- 
tion. Nor  did  the  eagle,  after  mewing  his  mighty  youth  in 
monasteries  and  barracks,  receive  any  response  to  the  wild 
throbbings  in  his  bosom  when  he  swooped  down  upon 
Josephine's  dove  cote. 

Thereupon  he  bade  his  heart  to  dismiss  its  distracting  illu- 
sions, and  thenceforth  he  omitted  from  his  scheme  of  universal 
conquest  the  hemisphere  of  womankind.  Men  were  intoxi- 
cated by  his  glance,  and  died  by  the  thousands  to  win  his 
smile.  In  the  midst  of  a  prostrate  world,  however,  woman- 
hood stood  erect  and  unconquered,  and  it  is  doubtful  if  any 
woman  lost  either  her  head  or  her  heart  as  the  Great  Unloved 
marched  on  to  his  destiny. 


.      CHAPTER  XXXV 
THE  DIVORCE 

1809      AGE  40 

V       "%  "W  THILE  Napoleon  dwelt  in  the  palace  of  the  fugitive 
1  %/  %/     Archduchess   Marie   Louise   of  Austria   at    Schon- 

1  ^     ^       brunrij   in   1809,   and   occupied   the   room   of   the 

1      future  King  of  Rome,  he  formed  the  long-defer-r^d^cgsplution 
I      to  divorce  Josephine,  and,  marrying  a  daughter  of  one  of  the 
1      ancient  dynasties,  provide  an  heir  to  his  throne. 
^i^^  As  the  victor  of  Wagram,  in  the  pride  of  success  and  the 
\    responsibility  of  power,  walked  the  palace  halls  of  the  Haps- 
burgs,   his  determination  ripened  that  the   inheritor  of  his 
glory  and  his  conquests,  should  be  at  once  a  child  of  his  own 
potent  blood  and  the  scion  of  a  race  of  kings.     He  saw  no 
other  way   to   lift   the   imperial   succession   above   the   ugly 
jealousies  and  conspiracies  that  had  already  divided  the  Bona- 
partes  and  place  it  beyond  the  rivalry  of  the  more  ambitious 
marshals  who  stood  ready  to  fight  for  the  crown  among  them- 
■  ^^Ives. 
I      Like  his  only  companions  in  fame,  he  was  childless,  but  he 
would    not,    like   Alexander,    bequeath   his   kingdom    to   the 
strongest,  or,  like  Ccesar,  adopt  a  nephew.     All  the  while  the 
same  superserviceable  faction  which,  for  its  own  profit,  had 
paved  his  way  to  the  life  Consulate,  and  then  to  the  throne, 
was  eagerly  plotting,  in  season  and  out,  to  have  him  marry 
again  and  leave  a  successor  to  that  throne  by  which  its  mem- 
bers lived. 

^"Wagram  seems  to  have  decided  the  issue,  when  it  confirmed 

anew  Napoleon's  title  to  the  vastest  and  richest  estate  in  the 

w^orld.     The  Empress  did  not  miss  the  calamitous  significance 

\of  that  battle  to  her,  nor  fail  to  understand  that  in  her  hus- 

^  292 


\ 


THE  DIVORCE  293 

V band's  victory  she  had  lost  her  fight.  On  his  return  to 
Paris,  he  found  Josephine's  creditors,  alarmed  by  her  sink- 
ing fortunes,  clamouring  for  money,  and  he  was  amazed  to 
learn  that  again  she  was  floundering  in  debt. 
—li'^Extravagance  appears  to  have  been  Josephine's  one  fault 
under  the  Empire.  It  is  doubtful  if  she  had  given  the  Em- 
peror any  other  grievance  since  she  took  her  place  beside  him 
on  the  throne.  Once  he  cast  her  milliner  in  prison  for  sev- 
eTal  hours  to  frighten  her  out  of  her  habit  of  extortion.  Life 
imprisonment  would  not  have  corrected  the  reckless  ex- 
,  ^  penditures  of  the  Empress,  with  her  500  chemises,  her  new 
^A  pair  of  stockings  for  each  dressing,  her  300  or  400  cashmere 
f^         shawls,  some  costing  nearly  $2500,  and  her  robes  of  lace  for 

^ \  which  she  paid  as  high  as  $20,000  each.     Mme.  de  Remusat 

^M  never  entered  a  dressmaker's  or  a  milliner's,  go  when  she 

^  would,  that  she  did  not  find  something  in  the  making  for  the 

Empress.  Her  annual  allowance  for  dress  rose  as  high  as 
$90,000,  but  her  credit  being  good,  she  spent  as  much  as 
r'  $220,000  in  a  year.  Out  of  her  yearly  expenditures,  how- 
ever, she  accumulated  most  of  her  jewellery,  which  repre- 
sented at  the  time  of  the  divorce  an  investment  of  nearly 
$1,000,000. 

^■^.^ffihenever  creditors  pressed  and  the  inevitable  time  of 
reckoning  came,  the  Empress  cried  and  the  Emperor  raged, 
but  not  at  her  so  much  as  at  the  tradesmen.  Although  he 
arbitrarily  cut  down  their  bills  30,  40,  and  50  per  cent.,  they 
were  well  enough  satisfied  with  the  profit  still  remaining  to 
start  at  once  a  new  campaign  of  temptation  and  a  new  ac- 
count with  the  Empress.  , 

I      Even  in  her  weakness,  however,  there  is  to  be  found  thel 
I  source  of  Josephine's  strength.     Her  Creole  love  of  beauty  \ 
and  luxury,  costly  as  it  was,  had  framed  a  fitting  background 
for  Napoleon's  imperial  pretensions  and  made  his  court  the 
foremost  in  the  world  when,  had  he  been  left  to  his  own  de- 
vices, it  would  have  been  nothing  more  than  a  military  camp 

and  the  butt  of  scornful  Europe.  — 

With  a  simple  and  genuine  fondness  for  people,  and  with 
a  native  dignitv  free  from  the  stiff  hauteur,  the  icv  arti- 


294  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ficiality  of  women  bred  in  royal  palaces,  the  supple  little  is- 
lander from  the  sugar  loft  of  Martinique  deftly  blended  a 
motley  array  of  ex-sergeants  and  their  garrison  wives  with 
the  old  nobility.  Under  her  dainty  touch,  the  Tuileries  be- 
came the  mould  of  form  and  the  looking  glass  of  fashion  for 
all  the  ancient  and  frumpy  courts  of  the  continent.  Even 
the  English,  although  they  blockaded  Napoleon  relentlessly, 
were  eager  enough  to  smuggle  across  to  London  the  latest 
models  from  Josephine's  dressmakers. 

While  the  Emperor  was  waging  his  military  campaigns,  it 
was  no  less  her  duty  to  conduct  the  Empress'  social  campaigns, 
and  a  censorious  world  could  find  no  fault  in  her  strategy. 
Her  continual  journeyings  from  palace  to  palace,  from  coun- 
try to  country  in  tortuous  coaches  over  racking  roads  weary 
and  stagger  the  understanding. 

jTShe  lived  wholly  for  Napoleon  and  his  interests.  Having 
ino  great  ambitions  of  her  own,  no  desire  for  power  or 
'grandeur,  she  did  not  meddle  in  politics,  but  in  the  spirit  of  a 
grocer's  or  banker's  wife,  she  made  it  her  main  purpose  in 
life  to  please  her  husband,  look  after  his  home  and  promote 
his  success  by  being  agreeable  to  his  associates.  Because  she 
was  the  wife  of  an  Emperor,  whose  home  was  a  palace,  whose 
business  was  ruling  the  world  and  whose  associates  were  kings, 
princes  and  dukes,  her  duties  were  no  lighter  and  no  less 
difficult. 

r-  "How  this  wearies  me,"  she  once  exclaimed.  "I  have  not 
a  moment  to  myself.  It  would  be  better  for  me  were  I  the 
wife  of  a  labourer."  Although  diamond  crowns  and  gilded 
salons  cast  their  illusion  over  the  scene  of  her  splendid 
drudgery,  Josephine  could  not  have  toiled  harder  had  she 
been  a  labourer's  wife.  For  three  hours  each  day  she  slaved 
over  her  morning  toilet,  and  thrice  daily  she  changed  her 
linen  throughout.  A  mob  of  servitors  and  courtiers  sur- 
rounded her  morning,  noon,  and  night.  She  breakfasted, 
lunched,  and  dined  with  them,  and  the  repetition  of  some 
dreary  function  was  scheduled  for  each  waking  hour.  "Be 
gay !  Be  gay ! ' '  That  was  the  imperial  command  always. 
"However  borne  down  under  the  burden  of  a  crown,  how- 


THE  DIVORCE  295 

ever  ill  she  might  be,  and  she  was  not  physically  strong,  how- 
ever hard  her  head  ached,  never  did  Josephine  on  her  unend- 
ing round  of  petty  tasks,  disappoint  the  Emperor  with  a  mis- 
step, a  wrong  word  or  a  lacking  smile.  There  never  was  an 
indiscreet  remark,  an  intrigue,  an  act  of  favouritism  on  her 
part  to  embarrass  her  husband  for  a  moment.  He,  who  above 
all  men  valued  every  tick  of  the  clock,  never  had  to  complain 
that  she  kept  him  waiting  a  minute.  And  when  he  was  worn 
out  by  the  cares  of  a  crowded  day,  she,  who  never  opened  a 
book  for  her  own  enjoyment,  lay  across  the  foot  of  his  bed 
and  read  him  to  sleep  in  that  voice  whose  tones  unfailingly 
entranced  him. 

No  man,  monarch  or  peasant,  could  ask  for  a  truer  help- 
meet. But  the  lord  of  the  earth  was  without  an  heir. 
r^'TheJong  dreaded  hour  struck  for  Josephine  at  the  end  of  "^ 
(  November,  1809,  when  Paris  was  in  the  midst  of  preparations 
for  the  celebration  of  the  fifth  anniversary  of  the  coronation 
and  from  all  the  federated  nations  of  the  Empire,  kings  and 
queens,  princes  and  princesses  were  thronging  into  the  city. 
After  a  silent,  mournful  dinner  in  the  Tuileries,  the  Emperor 
and  Empress  retired  to  his  apartments,  where,  while  she  was 
holding  the  cup  of  coffee  which  he  had  just  passed  to  her,  he 
spoke  the  words  that  for  many  days  had  been  struggling  for 
expression.  The  historian  of  the  tragic  scene,  in  the  person 
of  the  prefect  of  the  palace,  sitting  in  a  chair  tilted  against 
the  wall  of  the  corridor  outside  the  door,  suddenly  heard  loud 
shrieks  from  the  Emperor's  room.  An  usher,  who  also  heard 
them,  would  have  opened  the  door  had  not  his  chief  told  him 
that  the  Emperor  would  call  for  assistance  if  he  needed 
_it, 

p^.  The  prefect  was  right.     In  a  moment  the  door  opened  and   ; 
the  Emperor  stood  before  him,  his  eyes  full  of  tears  and  his  I 
i  voice    choking   in    his    extreme    agitation.     The   functionary 
I  entered  the  room,  to  find  Josephine  lying  on  the  floor  and   I 
uttering  piercing  cries :     ' '  I  shall  not  survive  it !     I  shall  not 
survive  it!"     The  Emperor  asked  the  prefect  to  carry  the 
stricken  Empress  down  to  her  own  apartments,  on  the  floor 
below,  and  he  took  a  candle  off  a  table  to  light  the  way.     The 


296    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

private  stairs,  however,  proving  too  narrow  for  her  to  be  car- 
ried down  in  one  pair  of  arms,  the  Emperor  gave  the  candle 
to  the  usher  and  helped  the  prefect  bear  her  to  her  room. 

Having  played  the  woman  that  brief  while,  Josephine 
quickly  and  bravely  resumed  the  part  of  Empress.  Nothing 
in  her  brilliant  reign  became  her  more  than  her  farewell  to 
her  greatness.  The  fetes  went  on  and,  although  she  could  not 
keep  back  the  tears  and  summon  the  vanished  smile,  she  faith- 
fully met  all  her  duties  in  the  mocking  ceremonials. 

Queen  Hortense,  perked  up  in  a  glistering  grief  for  her 
eldest  son  and  wearing  a  golden  sorrow  in  her  loveless  wed- 
lock, was  unhappiness  enthroned  and  could  not  understand 
why  her  mother  should  dread  the  loss  of  a  crown.  Josephine 
was  a  daughter  of  the  sun,  and,  while  she  eared  nothing  for 
power,  she  was  naturally  proud  of  the  success  with  which  she 
had  sat  the  highest  throne  of  earth  and  retained  the  affection 
and  merited  the  admiration  of  the  foremost  man  of  the  world. 
If  her  early  indifference  had  not  really  warmed  into  love  for 
Napoleon,  she  had  at  least  become,  in  their  nearly  fourteen 
ye'ars  of  married  life,  a  fond  and  devoted  wife,  caj)able  of_feel- 
ing  tlie  pangs  of  jealousy. 
— 'w  ith  the  arrival  of  Eugene,  the  formal  arrangements  for  his 
mother's  divorce  were  entered  upon.  The  son  had  anticipated 
the  situation,  and  had  written  to  her  a  month  before  that  if 
the  Emperor  believed  his  happiness  and  the  interests  of 
France  required  him  to  have  children,  no  consideration  should 
be  permitted  to  oppose  him,  and  he  invited  Josephine,  in  event 
of  divorce,  to  live  with  him  in  Italy.  Finally,  it  fell  to 
Eugene  to  make  the  first  public  announcement  of  the  matter. 
"It  is  necessary  for  the  happiness  of  France  that  the  founder 
of  this  fourth  dynasty  should  grow  old,  surrounded  by  his 
direct  descendants  as  a  guarantee  to  us  all, ' '  he  told  the  senate. 
"The  tears  that  his  resolution  has  drawn  from  the  Emperor 
suffice  for  my  mother's  glory." 

/^either  the  Empress  nor  her  children  could  have  asked  for 
'imore  generous  terms  than  Napoleon  volunteered.     He  pro- 
posed that  she  should  retain  her  imperial  rank  as  crowned 
!Eimpress,  have  the  Elysee  palace  in  Paris,  as  well  as  her  cher- 


THE  DIVORCE  297 

ished  abode  at  IMalmaison  and  the  chateau  of  Navarre  for  her  \ 
residences,  and  receive  an  allowance  of  $600,000  a  year.  ^ 

It  was  agreed  that  the  divorce  should  be  lawfully  pro^ 
nounced  by  mutual  consent  in  a  family  council  in  strict  ac- 
cordance with  the  provisions  of  the  Code  Napoleon.  At  nine 
in  the  evening  of  December  15,  Josephine  entered  the  throne 
room  to  take  part  in  her  last  function  at  the  Tuileries.  The 
act  of  divorce  was  read,  and  the  Empress,  drying  her  eyes, 
rose  to  read  her  speech  in  a  voice  surprisingly  composed.  She 
began  bravely  enough: 

With  the  permission  of  our  ausrust  and  dear  spouse,  I  declare 
that,  since  I  have  no  hope  of  bearing  children  who  can  satisfy  the 
requirements  of  his  policy  and  the  interests  of  France,  it  is  my 
pleasure  to  give  him  the  greatest  proof  of  attachment  and  devotion 
which  ever  was  given  on  earth. 

Now  her  voice  trembled  and  utterly  failed  her.  As  she 
sank  weeping  into  her  chair,  she  handed  the  paper  to  a  gentle- 
man of  the  court  and  dumbly  appealed  to  him  to  finish  the 
speech,  which  continued: 

I  owe  all  to  his  bounty.  It  was  his  hand  which  crowned  me  and, 
seated  on  bis  throne,  I  have  received  nothing  but  proofs  of  affec- 
tion and  devotion  from  the  French  people.  The  dissolution  of  my 
marriage  will  make  no  change  in  the  sentiments  of  my  heart.  The 
Emperor  will  always  have  in  me  his  best  friend.  I  know  how  much 
this  act,  which  is  made  necessary  by  his  policy  and  bj-  such  great 
interests,  has  wounded  his  heart,  but  we  shall  win  glory,  both  of  us, 
for  the  sacrifices  we  have  made  for  our  country. 

After  a  few  minutes  the  Emperor  and  Empress  met  again 
to  mingle  their  tears  in  a  private  leave  taking,  when  Josephine 
covered  his  face  with  kisses  and  for  the  last  time  he  embraced 
the  bride  of  his  youth  and  his  glory.  Napoleon  at  once  en- 
tered a  waiting  carriage  and  drove  alone  in  his  gloom  through 
the  black  night  to  Versailles,  there  to  pass  a  few  days  in  soli- 
tude at  the  palace  of  the  Grand  Trianon. 

Josephine's  departure  was  deferred  until  the  next  after- 
noon. A  few  courtiers  presented  themselves  in  the  morning 
to  take  formal  leave  of  her,  but  when  attended  bv  two  mem- 


298  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

bers  of  the  court  she  entered  her  carriage  for  the  drive  to 
Malmaison,  no  one  came  to  say  good-bye,  and  she  saw  not  a 
.friendly  or  grateful  face  as,  in  a  cold  and  dismal  rain,  she 
drove  away  from  the  Tuileries  forever.  The  palace  crowd 
were  saving  their  supple  hinges  and  their  fawnings  for  her 
successor. 

The  Emperor  rode  over  to  Malmaison  the  nest  day  to  call. 
There  he  strolled,  with  Josephine,  in  the  familiar  paths  of 
the  chateau  park,  but  there  were  no  more  embraces.  When 
he  had  returned  to  Versailles  he  at  once  sat  down  and  wrote 
her  a  letter  breathing  the  tenderest  anxiety  and  hastened  to 
despatch  it  by  courier  in  time  to  reach  the  Empress  before 
she  retired  for  the  night. 
r"  The  callers  at  Malmaison  all  came  away  with  tales  of 
'  Josephine's  tears,  and,  at  each  distressing  report,  the  Em- 
peror sped  a  courier  to  her  with  a  letter  appealing  to  her  forti- 
tude. He  called  again  in  person  on  Christmas  eve  to  invite 
her  to  a  Christmas  dinner  with  him  at  Versailles,  and  she  went 
with  Hortense  and  Eugene. 

Napoleon  returned  to  the  Tuileries  the  day  after  Christmas. 
He  had  been  away  a  fortnight  and  now  he  was  plainly  moved 
by  the  memories  the  place  evoked  and  shocked  to  find  it  so 
desolate  without  its  graceful  mistress.  "The  great  palace 
seemed  very  empty  to  me,"  he  confessed  inTiis'^airy'Tetter 
to  Josephine.  Once  more  he  paid  her  debts  and  he  appealed, 
to  her  to  try  to  live  on  $300,000  a  year,  saving  the  rest  of  her 
in  come  for  her  grandchildren. 

The  completion 'of  ETs" policy  inaugurated  by  the  divorce 
now  occupied  Napoleon's  attention  and  he  at  once  pressed 
his  plans  for  a  matrimonial  alliance  with  some  great  reign- 
ing house.  A  list  of  the  available  princesses  of  Europe  lay 
before  him  like  a  military  map.  The  widowerhood  of  the  most 
celebrated  and  powerful  man  of  his  time,  with  the  loftiest 
throne  in  the  world  at  his  bestowal,  aroused  more  fear,  how- 
ever, than  ambition  in  the  bosoms  of  some  of  the  eligibles. 
Queen  Louise,  who  had  only  lately  returned  to  Berlin  from 
her  long  exile,  thanked  God  in  her  maternal  heart  that  her 
first  born  daughter  was  dead  and  safe  from  the  possibility  of 


THE  DIVORCE  299 

being  sacrificed  to  the  conqueror.  And  the  Archduchess 
Marie  Louise  of  Austria  wrote  to  reassure "an~anxions  friend 
that  she~"\vas  in  no  peril,  as  her  father  was  too  good  to  think 
of  offering  her  up  to  the  minotaur ! 

Napoleon's  own  preference  was  to  bind  together  the  two     i 
empires  of  France  and  Russia  in  a  marriage  between  himself     \ 
and  a  Romanoff.     Alexander,  however,  was  childless,  like  him- 
self, and  had  only  sisters  to  be  considered.     And  their  mother 
hated  the  French  Emperor.     The  Czar,  caught  between  his 
importunate  ally  on  one  hand  and  his  mother  and  the  entire 
Russian  aristocracy  on  the  other,  parleyed  for  time.     For  two 
months  he  put  off  a  decisive  answer.     At  last  the  imperial 
and  imperious  widower  sent  an  ultimatum,  giving  the  Rus- 
sian court  forty-eight  hours  to  say  yes  or  no.     Still  Alexan(Jfii>^ 
continued  to  palter.  ...^^ 

Already  the  Emperor  Francis  of  Austria  Jiad_frankly  en-    ^ 
tered  his  daughter,  IMarie  Louise7'as'an  open  candidate  for 
the  vacant  tFrone.     Metternicli.  the  Austrian  foreign  minister, 
had  been  camping  on  the  trail  o.Ohe  divorce  f or^  twq^x^^i's 
and  no\v^that  itJiacLcome,  he  prepared  to  take  advantage  of  it. 

Metternich  and  the  crafty  politicians  in  Vienna  had  no 
doubt  that:  Napoleon  was  riding  for  a  fall.  They  shrewdly 
calculated,  howevej,  that  the  inevitable  day  of  reckoning  prob- 
ably was  four  years  off.  Meanwhile  Austria  must  keep  in  his 
good  graces  until  the  time  came  to  snatch  back  the  provinces 
he  had  taken  from  her.  A  marriage  alliance  with  him  surely 
would  stay  his  hand  and  at  the  same  time  weaken  his  political 
alliance  with  Russia,  thus  hastening  his  downfall.  It  was  a 
clever,  well-thought-out  scheme  on  the  part  of  the  Austrian 
court — and  it  would  cost  only  an  eighteen-year-old  girl ! -^ 

Weary  and  exasperated  with  the  Czar's  shifty  conduct,  Na-  ^ 
poleon  suddenly  turned  to  take  up  the  hint  which  the  Austrian 
government  had  dropped.  For  the  task  of  opening  the  deli- 
cate negotiations,  he  wished  to  select  the  most  tactful  and 
faithful  ambassador  in  all  his  Empire.  And  his  choice  fell 
upon  none  other  than  Josephine,  herself ! 

The  Empress,  as  loyal  as  ever,  did  not  hesitate  to  accept  the 
strange  duty.     Inviting  the  wife  of  Metternich  to  ]Malmaison 


300  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Vonly  two  weeks  after  the  divorce,  she  amazed  that  lady  by  ex- 
\  pressing  her  earnest  wish  that  her  divorced  husband  might 
mnd  consolation  in  a  marriage  with  Marie  Louise. 
?^=^When  at  length  in  the  course  of  official  discussions  between 
the  two  empires,  it  was  plain  that  Austria  was  as  willing  as 
Barkis,  Napoleon  took  a  vote  on  the  question  in  his  council  of 
state.     Marie  Louise   was  elected.     Josephine,  however,  had 
enjoyed  the  rare  honour  of  making  the  nomination  of  her  suc- 
cessor in  wedlock. 


CHAPTER  XXXVI 
THE  SECOND  MARRIAGE 

1810     AGE   40 

THE  world  stood  astounded  when  the  betrothal  of  Na-| 
poleon  and  the  Archduchess  JMarie  Louise  was  an-j 
nounced  in  the  middle  of  February,  1810.  "' 

The  public  had  assumed  that  the  Czar's  sister  was  to  be 
the  new  wife  of  the  divorced  Emperor.  Marie  Louise  herself, 
with  nothing  but  pity  in  her  heart  for  the  chosen  bride  of  the 
Corsican  ogre  of  her  girlish  fancy,  was  innocently  watching 
the  Frankfurt  Gazette  for  the  news  of  an  engagement  between 
him  and  a  Russian  grand  duchess,  when  toward  the  end  of 
January  she  was  surprised  and  alarmed  to  hear  that  her  own 
selection  was  under  consideration.  The  young  Archduchess 
was  away  from  home  at  the  time,  but  hastened  to  write  to  her 
father,  the  Emperor  Francis,  imploring  him  to  spare  her. 
Meanwhile,  Count  Metternich,  her  father's  minister  of  foreign  . 
affairs  and  the  real  matchmaker,  was  coolly  flattering  himself 
in  aTletter  to  his  wife  at  Paris  that  "the  Archduchess  is  still 
ignorant,  as  is  proper,  of  the  plans  concerning  her  .  .  .  Our 
princesses  are  little  accustomed  to  choose  their  husbands  ac- 
cording to  their  own  inclinations."  ""^"^ 

Austria  was  delighted  to  cut  out  Russia  in  that  remarkable 
courtship  for  the  hand  of  the  conqueror  of  Europe.  The 
prophetic  statesmen  of  Vienna  congratulated  themselves  that 
they  had  alienated  Napoleon  and  Alexander — and  opened  the 
way  to  the  disastrous  Russian  invasion  two  years  later !  At 
least  one  of  Napoleon's  own  advisers  foretold  the  conse- 
quences. Cambaceres,  who  insisted  that  the  bridegroom  would 
have  to  fight  whichever  power  he  disappointed  in  the  mar- 
riage, favoured  the  choice  of  a  Russian  wife  because  the  Em- 

301 


■302  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

peror  was  "familiar  with  the  road  to  Vienna  but  might  not 
find  the  road  to  St.  Petersburg." 

The  people  of  Vienna  were  not  more  surprised  and  startled 
when  Napoleon  blew  up  their  walls  four  months  before  than 
they  were  by  the  report  that  the  eldest  daughter  of  their  Em- 
peror was  to  marry  the  man  who  had  twice  seized  their  city 
and  who  had  lately  brought  Francis  to  his  feet  for  the  fourth 
time.  Only  ten  months  had  passed  since  they  saw  Marie 
Louise  flying  before  the  vanguard  of  her  chosen  bridegroom. 
The  path  of  his  invading  army  down  the  valley  of  the  Danube 
could  still  be  plainly  traced  by  the  wreckage  left  in  its  wake, 
and  across  the  river  from  the  capital,  the  charred  and  bat- 
tered ruins  of  Aspem,  Essling  and  Wagram  continued  to 
bear  grim  witness  to  the  deadly  enmity  between  him  and  the 
Hapsburgs. 

Yet  the  Viennese,  quickly  recovering  from  their  surprise, 
rejoiced  to  give  the  victor  an  Austrian  bride  as  a  hostage  to 
peace.  "If  I  had  saved  the  world,"  Metternich  felicitated 
himself,  "I  could  not  receive  more  congratulations  or  more 
homage."  The  Austrian  national  securities  rose  30  percent, 
in  two  hours  ^after  the  confirmation  of  the  rumours  that 
.^^tfia  had  bound  the  giant  with  ribbons  of  white. 

-  The  archbishop  of  Vienna  made  some  slight  difficulty  about 
a  marriage  with  a  divorced  person.  Napoleon,  however,  had 
caused  a  council  of  French  prelates  to  annul  his  religious 
marriage  to  Josephine,  which  had  been  solemnized  by  Cardinal 
Fesch  just  before  the  coronation.  The  annulment  was  made 
on  the^  grounds  that  the  priest  of  the  parish  was  not  present, 
th94;~the  required  witnesses  were  lacking  and  that  the  bride- 
groom really  had  been  married  without  his  own  consent ! 
According  to  the  custom  of  the  church,  the  Pope  alone  cxmid 
decide  a  question  concerning  the  validity  of  a  sovereign's  mar- 
riage, but  the  decree  of  annulment  by  the  Paris  tribunal  suf- 
fi-ced  to  quiet  the  conscience  of  the  archbishop  of  Vienna. 

—  When  at  last  ^letternieh  pretended  to  consult  Marie  Louise 
herself  about  the  marriage,  she  only  asked,  "What  are  my 
father's  wishes?"  From  childhood  the  Archduchess  had  been 
taught  to  abhor  the  French  Revolution,  which  had  slain  her 


THE  SECOND  MARRIAGE  303 

beautiful  great  aunt,  Marie  Antoinette,  the  latest  archduchess 
that  Austria  had  given  to  France,  and  to  look  upon  Napoleon 
as  the  incarnation  of  its  savagery.  He  had  always  been  held 
up  before  her  as  the  outlawed  foe  of  the  human  race,  the 
usurper  who  had  driven  from  their  thrones  her  grandmother, 
the  Queen  of  Naples ;  her  uncle,  the  Grand  Duke  of  Tuscany, 
and  her  stepmother's  father,  the  Duke  of  IModena,  and  who 
had  been  the  unrelenting  scourge  of  her  family  since  she  was 
a  child.  In  all  her  battles  with  toy  soldiers  on  the  nursery 
floor  the  most  villainous  among  them  had  unfailingly  been 
chosen  to  represent  him  and  had  received  from  her  girlish 
hands  the  crudest  assaults.  Now,  however,  that  her  father 
bade  her  throw  herself  into  the  arms  of  the  hideous  hob- 
goblin of  her  girlhood,  she  obediently  dismissed  every  thought 
that  conflicted  with  her  duty  as  a  daughter. 

While  she  had  been  well  instructed  in  the  classic  and  mod- 
ern languages  and  could  speak  French  almost  as  well  as  she 
spoke  her  native  German,  her  thinking  faculties  had  received 
no  more  training  than  a  well  coached  parrot's.  Her  mind 
had  been  left  a  clean,  white  blank,  according  to  the  Hapsburg 
rule  of  rearing  a  princess,  which  exalted  ignorance  into  the 
virtue  of  innocence.  Every  illusion  to  forbidden  subjects 
had  been  laboriously  cut  out  of  papers  and  books  before  the 
modest  eyes  of  Marie  Louise  were  privileged  to  see  them. 
She  had  dogs  and  cats,  horses  and  birds  and  all  manner  of 
pets,  but  they  were  carefully  chosen  from  her  own  sex,  and 
not  a  male  of  any  species  had  been  permitted  to  steal  into  her 
virginal  precincts.  Her  whole  world  had  been  thoroughly  ex- 
purgated. 

■  Naturally  enough  when  this  prisoner  of  caste  suddenly"" 
found  herself  the  betrothed  of  the  mightiest  ruler  of  earth  and 
destined  for  the  most  brilliant  of  thrones,  she  began  to  feel 
a  growing  interest  in  her  new  fortunes  as  an  Empress.  She 
frankly  enjoyed  the  humble  deference  of  a  court  which 
hitherto  had  ignored  her  as  a  child,  and  her  childish  vanity 
was  excited  by  the  popular  interest  she  aroused,  the  people 
standing  before  the  palace  morning  after  morning  to  see  her 
on  her  wav  to  mass.  ^^ 


304     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  Fl-ench  ambassador  to  Paris  reported,  "I  must  say 
that  during  the  whole  hour  of  my  interview  Her  Imperial 
Highness  did  not  once  speak  of  Paris  fashions  or  theatres!" 
Metternieh,  however,  thought  she  ought  to  improve  her  ac- 
quaintance with  the  fashions,  for  he  wrote  his  wife,  "When  she 
is  properly  dressed  and  put  in  shape  she  will  do  very  well.  I 
have  begged  her  to  engage  a  dancing  master  as  soon  as  she 
arrives  in  Paris  and  not  to  dance  until  she  has  learned  how." 

The  bride  and  groom  never  had  met  and  indeed  had  not  so 
much  as  seen  each  other's  picture.  For  obvious  reasons  Na- 
poleon 's  likeness  had  not  adorned  the  palace  walls  of  the  Haps- 
burgs.  Prince  Berthier  came,  however,  bringing  a  miniature 
of  him,  surrounded  by  sixteen  diamonds  and  costing  $100,000. 

A  quickly  executed  portrait  of  the  bride  was  despatched  to 
Paris  in  exchange,  and  as  Napoleon  devoured  it  with  his 
eyes  he  exclaimed  with  delight,  ' '  The  Hapsburg  lip !  The 
Hapsburg  lip ! " 

That  thick  under  lip  was  the  trade  mark  of  the  oldest  im- 
perial race  of  Europe,  and  the  charity  pupil  of  Brienne 
proudly  rejoiced  in  the  vanity  of  its  possession.  As  for  the 
rest,  Marie  Louise's  features  w'ere  undistinguished  and  plain. 
The  Countess  Potocka  speaks  of  her  "wooden  face"  and 
"large,  pale  blue,  porcelain  eyes."  Still  it  is  agreed  that  her 
tall  figure  was  good;  some  authorities  say  it  was  even  beauti- 
ful, and  her  hair  was  light  chestnut  and  abundant. 
r"  Two  old,  drab  churches  stand  neighbours  on  little  side 
/streets  of  Vienna  off  the  Ring  and  near  the  Burg,  the  city 
palace  of  the  Hapsburgs.  In  one  Marie  Louise  was  married ; 
in  the  other  she  was  buried.  They  are  the  beginning  and  the 
end  of  her  strange  story.  When,  in  IMarch,  1810,  she  stood  at 
the  altar  of  the  Augustin  church  to  receive  from  her  Uncle 
Charles,  as  Napoleon's  proxy,  the  ring  of  the  Emperor  of  the 
French,  not  a  year  had  yet  passed  since  she  and  the  imperial 
family  had  knelt  at  that  altar  in  anxious  prayer  for  the  vic- 
tory of  Charles  over  Napoleon. 

"^When  the  new  Empress  of  the  French  arrived  at  the  River 
Inn,  the  frontier  of  the  kingdom  of  Bavaria  and  of  the  Na- 
poleonic empire,  her  dowry  of  $100,000  was  counted  out  and 


^pi^^^^^^^^^H 

■■ 

^1 

^BL^_        ^1 

L^^^^^H 

1 

1^  4-^ 

^^H 

^^^^K^^^i^^ 

l^'-^^.^^H 

MHH 

^^^^^B 

l\"  i 

^^B 

^^^^KP' 

i>  ^ 

^^^^H 

I  ^^^ 

4^ 

'    _  ^' j 

^H 

^^^^^^^^^^^■^^^K    '          ^1 

f  ^ 

a 

;* 

1  ^ 

^^H 

■^>i^;.al 

^1 

Mabie  Louise  a>-d  the  King  of  RoiiE,  by  Gebabd 


THE  SECOND  MARRIAGE 

delivered  to  the  French  and  she  herself  was  formally  chec 
off  and  transferred  like  any  other  consignment.  A  wooi 
pavilion  had  been  erected  on  the  boundary,  and  after  entering 
it  from  the  Austrian  side,  i\Iarie  Louise  passed  on  to  a  second 
or  neutral  chamber  in  the  pavilion.  Beyond  that  room  was 
the  third  or  French  compartment,  where  a  company  of  cour- 
tiers from  Paris  waited  to  receive  their  sovereign.  In  their 
eagerness  to  see  her,  they  had  bored  gimlet  holes  in  the  par- 
tition between  the  two  rooms,  and  the  prefect- of  the  Tuileries, 
he  who  had  helped  three  months  before  to  carry  the  fainting 
Josephine  to  her  apartments,  records  in  his  memoirs  his  peep 
at  her.  Soon  the  Austrians  knocked  at  the  door  for  the 
French  to  come  in.  They  entered  to  find  the  Empress  seated 
on  a  throne,  and  her  eyes  were  filled  with  tears  as  she  looked 
on  her  subjects  for  the  first  time. 

Marie  Louise  accompanied  her  new  custodians  to  a  mer- 
chant's house  in  Braunau,  where,  following  the  requirements 
of  custom,  she  divested  herself  of  every  garment  and  adorn- 
ment from  her  own  country,  as  a  symbol  of  her  purpose  to 
leave  behind  her  all  that  was  Austrian.  An  elaborate 
trousseau,  including  sixty-four  dresses,  had  been  made  for 
her  in  Paris  at  a  cost  of  $80,000,  and  Napoleon  had  personally 
inspected  it  down  to  its  sixty  pairs  of  shoes. 

After  two  hours'  steady  work,  the  Empress  was  duly  ar- 
rayed in  the  fashions  of  Paris.  The  next  thing  she  did  was 
to  sit  down  and  write  her  father.  Although  she  protested  that 
she  was  inconsolable  except  for  the  reflection  that  she  was 
sacrificing  herself  for  him,  she  playfully  added,  "I  assure  you 
I  am  already  as  much  perfumed  as  the  French  women." 

At  ]\Iunich  the  girl  bride  received  a  heavy  blow.  Napoleon 
had  ordered  that  no  member  of  her  Austrian  suite  should 
enter  France  with  her  and  the  one  friend  who  had  been  per- 
mitted to  continue  in  her  company  after  the  parting  on  the 
Bavarian  frontier  was  now  sent  back.  She  was  left  utterly 
forlorn  among  strangers,  but  submitted  in  silent  grief. 

As  the  Emperor  watched  for  her  coming,  the  cares  of  em- 
pire were  forgotten  and  he  went  to  the  palace  of  Compiegne 
because  it  was  fifty  miles  out  on  the  road.     The  old  chateau 


306  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

that  sits  on  its  terrace  above  the  valley  of  the  Oise  was  swiftly 
refurnished  and  redecorated.  Napoleon  ordered  the  installa- 
tion of  a  system  of  water  works,  set  up  statues  in  the  park  and 
began  the  construction  of  a  broad  iron-trellised  walk  three 
quarters  of  a  mile  long  in  imitation  of  ]Marie  Louise 's  favourite 
arbour  at  Schonbrunn.  He  also  thoughtfully  instructed  his 
representatives  at  Vienna  to  forward  the  most  cherished  of 
her  personal  belongings.  They  complied  by  sending  her  little 
dog,  her  bird,  and  a  piece  of  tapestry  which  she  had  left  be-  > 
hind  unfinished,  and  he  fondly  planned  to  surprise  her  with 
them  on  her  arrival. 

At  the  thought  of  waiting  another  day  for  his  affianced 
bride,  he  burst  the  bounds  of  restraint  and  suddenly  shouted, 
* '  0,  ho  !  0,  ho  !  Constant !  Order  a  carriage  without  livery 
and  come  dress  me ! "  Taking  with  him  only  King  Murat, 
he  impulsively  dashed  off  in  a  IMareh  downpour.  "When  the 
postillions  of  the  Empress'  coach,  who  were  laboriously 
urging  on  their  horses  through  the  mud  and  storm,  saw  the 
Emperor  standing  out  of  the  rain  under  the  porch  of  a  coun- 
try church  they  were  struck  speechless  with  astonishment. 
An  equerry  riding  beside  the  coach  looked  in  the  direction  of 
their  startled  gaze,  and  as  he  saw  the  drenched  monarch  run- 
ning toward  him  he  cried,  "L'Empereur !" 

The  coach  step  was  quickly  lowered  and  in  another  moment 
the  Emperor  had  his  arms  around  the  neck  of  Marie  Louise. 
Then  he  made  the  highly  important  statement,  "You  are 
surely  not  afraid  of  mud  ! ' '  ]\Iarie  Louise  made  the  far  more 
significant  observation,  "Why,  you  are  much  better  looking 
than  your  picture  ! ' ' 

Late  in  a  stormy  evening  the  soaking  postillions  and  much 
bespattered  coach  drew  up  at  the  foot  of  the  steps  of  the  palace 
of  Compiegne.  After  getting  rid  of  the  inevitable  ceremonies 
there  in  short  order,  the  Empress  retired  to  her  apartments, 
where  she  was  soon  joined  by  the  Emperor.  He  had  intended 
to  lodge  under  another  roof,  but  on  consulting  both  legal  and 
religious  advisers,  he  received  the  welcome  assurance  that  the 
-marriage  by  proxy  was  a  marriage  in  fact,  as  had  been  de- 
termined in  the  instance  of  Henry  IV  and  Marie  de  Medici. 


THE  SECOND  MARRIAGE  307 

In  the  Gallery  of  Apollo  at  St.  Cloud,  where  Napoleon  first 
seized  the  reins  of  power  and  where  he  was  first  acclaimed 
Emperor,  his  union  with  the  daughter  of  the  Hapsburgs  was 
confirmed  by  a  civil  marriage,  after  which  a  grand  entry  into 
Paris  was  made  for  the  purpose  of  another  religious  mar- 
riage, but  this  time  not  by  proxy. 

The  Emperor  and  the  Empress  entered  the  city  under  the 
unfinished  Arc  de  Triomphe  de  I'Etoile,  to  which  5000  work- 
men had  hastily  given  the  appearance  of  completion  by  the 
use  of  wood  and  canvas.  Marie  Louise  sat  in  the  gilded  cor- 
onation coach  where  Josephine  had  sat  only  a  little  more  than 
five  years  before,  and  wore  the  crown  of  diamonds  that  had 
sparkled  on  the  brow  of  her  Creole  predecessor.  But  a  more 
disquieting  suggestion  than  that  was  presented  as  she  drove 
across  the  Place  de  la  Concorde,  where  her  great-aunt,  Marie 
Antoinette,  had  died  on  the  scaffold  sixteen  years  before,  a 
suggestion  that  might  have  awakened  bitter  memories  in  a 
person  having  a  livelier  imagination. 

The  beautiful  Salon  Carre  of  the  Louvre,  from  whose  walls 
Mona  Lisa  smiles  her  inscrutable  smile  and  the  immortal 
creations  of  Raphael,  Titian  and  the  masters  look  down  upon 
the  wondering  visitors,  had  been  converted  into  a  chapel  for 
the  third  marriage  ceremony.  On  velvet  cushioned  benches 
the  full  length  of  the  Grand  Gallery  opening  out  of  that  im- 
provised chapel,  4000  women  sat,  and  behind  them  in  double 
rows  stood  4000  men,  while  Napoleon  enthroned  his  young 
bride  beside  him  and  the  nuptial  benediction  was  pronounced 
by  the  Cardinal  Grand  Almoner  of  France — Uncle  Fesch ! 

The  dethroned  Josephine  viewed  from  her  melancholy  re- 
treat the  Emperor's  new  domestic  relations.  Although  she 
was  as  near  as  Malmaison,  she  wrote  assuring  him, 

I  shall  live  here  as  if  I  were  1000  leagues  from  Paris.  I  have 
made  a  great  sacrifice,  Sire,  and  eveiy  daj^  I  feel  more  and  more 
the  full  extent  of  it.  .  .  .  It  will  be  a  complete  one  as  far  as  I  am 
concerned.  Your  Majesty  shall  not  be  troubled  in  your  happiness 
by  any  expression  of  my  regi'et.  I  shall  pray  incessantly  that  Your 
Majesty  may  be  happy,  perhaps  I  may  even  pray  that  I  may  see 
you  again.     But  let  Your  Majesty  be  assured  I  shall  always  respect 


308     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  new  situation  in  which  Your  Majesty  finds  yourself,  and  respect 
it  in  silence. 

It  was  indeed  a  strange  and  difficult  part  the  divorced  Em- 
press was  called  upon  to  play,  but  she  effaced  herself  as  suc- 
cessfully as  in  other  days  she  had  borne  the  fierce  and  search- 
ing light  that  beats  upon  a  throne.  Neither  Josephine  nor 
Napoleon  in  their  separation  ever  gave  the  least  occasion  for 
evil  gossip,  although  the  first  recorded  tears  of  Marie  Louise 
in  France  were  shed  one  day  when  the  Emperor  had  gone  to 
call  on  her  predecessor.  Those  tears  only  signify,  however, 
that  she  had  come  to  care  enough  for  her  husband  to  cry 
over  him. 

Marie  Louise  was  not  troubled  to  find  that  in  her  marriage 
she  had  only  exchanged  palace  prisons  and  that  a  husband 
instead  of  her  father  had  become  her  warder.  Asleep  or 
awake,  she  was  hemmed  in  by  a  guard  of  ladies  in  waiting 
and  women  attendants  and  never  was  permitted  to  be  alone 
in  the  presence  of  a  man. 

The  Emperor  paraded  his  captive  in  imperial  progresses 
to  various  parts  of  France  and  she  insisted  on  going  with 
him  everywhere.  After  the  marriage  formalities  in  Paris 
they  had  returned  to  Compiegne,  and  that  palace  remains 
the  most  distinct  souvenir  of  Marie  Louise.  No  confusing 
recollections  of  Josephine  cling  to  its  leafy  park  and  stately 
halls,  for  she  seldom  if  ever  stayed  there.  On  the  visitors' 
register  French  citizens  of  many  minds  have  scrawled  their 
expressions  of  the  emotions  aroused  by  the  place:  "Vive 
I'Empereur!"  "Vive  le  Koi  de  Rome!"  "Vive  le  Prince 
Victor  et  la  Princesse  Clementine!"  "Marie  Louise,  in- 
grate,  who  could  not  comprehend  an  incomparable  genius!" 
"Poor  little  harp  of  I'Aiglon!"  "Vive  la  Republique — 
Liberte,  Egalite,  Fraternite!"     "How  times  have  changed!" 

As  the  official  shepherd  herds  his  tourist  flock  over  the  foot- 
wearying  parquetry  of  the  palace,  his  mumbled  story  is  of 
the  bridal  chamber  of  Marie  Louise  and  her  now  tubless  bath- 
room; of  her  music  room,  the  piano  Napoleon  gave  her;  the 
diminutive  harp  of  the  King  of  Rome,  and  his  childish  chair 
sitting  pathetically  before  it  as  if  the  little  boy  purple  had 


THE  SECOND  MARRIAGE 

only  just  run  out  to  romp  on  the  grassy  bank  of  the  lake. 
The  camp  dining  table  of  Napoleon  is  also  among  the  exliibits, 
an  ingenious  contrivance  which  might  accommodate  a  large 
company  of  guests  when  spread,  but  which  when  folded  half  a 
dozen  times  could  almost  be  carried  under  the  arm. 

The  bed  on  which  Marie  Antoinette  slept  the  first  night  she 
passed  under  a  Bourbon  roof,  and  the  bed  of  the  Empress 
Eugenie  link  those  unfortunate  sovereigns  with  Marie  Louise, 
while  the  statue  of  Joan  of  Arc  down  in  the  village  square 
recalls  that  it  was  there  the  maid  was  arrested.  Compiegne 
thus  presents  a  strange,  sad  quartet  of  women. 

In  the  garden  of  the  palace  is  a  stone  seat,  which  is  known 
as  Napoleon 's  bench,  since  there  the  eagle  often  perched  in  the 
rapturous  days  of  his  wedded  joys  and  the  full  meridian  of 
his  glory.  Yet  only  four  years  after  those  April  dreams  and 
April  hopes  on  the  garden  bench  at  Compiegne,  alien  troops 
burst  into  that  very  park  and  the  terrace  ran  with  the  blood 
of  Frenchmen  defending  the  honeymoon  chateau  of  Napoleon 
and  Marie  Louise  from  the  assaults  of  Russia,  Austria,  and  all 
Europe  banded  against  the  son-in-law  of  the  Hapsburgs. 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 

THE  KING  OF  ROME 

1811      AGE  41 

THE  world  paused  to  listen  as  the  stork  hovered  above 
the  palace  home  of  Napoleon  and  jNIarie  Louise  in  the 
early  spring  of  1811.  If  it  should  be  only  a  girl, 
twenty-one  guns  were  to  be  fired,  but  if  a  boy,  101  thunderous 
salvos  were  to  proclaim  the  birth  of  an  heir  to  the  sovereignty 
of  the  earth. 

In  the  Tuileries,  two  gorgeous  little  cribs  stood  side  by  side, 
one  pink,  the  other  blue.  Nearby  them  rose  the  gift  of  the 
city  of  Paris,  a  magnificent  cradle,  designed  by  the  famous 
artist,  Prudhon.  It  was  inlaid  with  mother  of  pearl  and 
golden  bees,  and  at  its  head  a  winged  figure  of  Glory  held  a 
crown  high  above  the  pillow,  while  a  young  eagle  perched  at 
the  foot  with  wings  outspread  ready  for  flight.  A  great  heap 
of  lacy,  tiny  garments  had  been  made  at  a  cost  of  $60,000, 
and  a  governess  from  the  highest  nobility  was  in  readiness  to 
take  her  appointed  place  of  honour  in  the  imperial  nursery. 

When  a  year  had  passed  since  Marie  Louise  made  her  entry 
into  the  Empire,  the  monstrous  clapper  of  the  great  bell  in 
the  south  tower  of  Notre  Dame  sounded  a  summons  to  the 
devout,  which  was  chimed  by  all  the  church  bells  of  Paris, 
calling  upon  the  people  to  give  the  night  over  to  prayer  for 
the  Empress.  Early  in  the  morning  while  the  Emperor  was 
resorting  to  his  customary  remedy  for  strained  nerves  in  a 
steaming  bath,  Dr.  Dubois,  the  foremost  maternity  specialist 
of  Paris,  excitedly  burst  in  upon  him  to  say  that  the  event 
was  at  hand,  and  that  he  feared  either  the  mother  or  the 
child  must  be  sacrificed. 

Napoleon  always  was  true  in  his  simpler  moments.     In  the 

310 


THE  KING  OF  ROME  311 

presence  of  the  problem  presented  to  him  by  the  phj^sician, 
the  monarch  and  his  dynastic  ambitions  gave  way  to  the  man 
and  the  husband.  ' '  Come !  Come !  M.  Dubois ! "  he  ex- 
claimed. "Do  not  lose  your  head!  What  would  you  do  in 
the  same  circumstances  if  you  were  attending  the  wife  of  a 
citizen?  Do  just  as  you  would  if  you  were  in  the  house  of  a 
tradesman  in  the  Rue  St.  Denis.  Be  careful  of  the  mother 
and  the  child,  but  if  you  cannot  save  both,  save  the  mother 
for  me.     Whatever  happens  consider  her  first." 

It  was  not  far  from  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning  when  a 
nine  pound  child  entered  the  world  which  was  to  be  his  birth- 
right. But  the  little  eagle  was  silent,  blue,  and  apparently 
lifeless  and  Napoleon  no  more  than  glanced  at  the  tiny  figure 
as  it  lay  neglected  on  the  floor.  Only  when  the  Empress  had 
rallied,  did  the  governess  turn  to  the  all-but-forgotten  and 
supposedly  dead  child.  Forcing  between  its  dumb  lips  a  drop 
of  brandy,  she  slapped  its  still  body  and  wrapped  it  in  hot 
cloths. 

It  was  seven  minutes  after  the  birth  when  a  faint  cry 
startled  the  company.  At  that  feeble  wail,  a  wild  joy  leaped 
into  the  heart  of  Napoleon,  and  he  bent  over  the  inheritor  of 
his  throne,  the  perpetuator  of  his  dynasty,  the  King  of  Rome ! 

Paris  and  France  and  all  the  subject  nations  still  waited 
and  watched  for  the  news  until  the  signal  battery  of  the 
Hotel  des  Invalides  began  to  boom.  The  city  stopped  and 
hearkened ;  the  people  in  the  streets  stood  still ;  the  trades- 
men in  the  shops  came  to  their  doors ;  the  women  in  the  homes 
opened  their  windows.  When  they  had  counted  twenty-one, 
it  seemed  as  if  the  salute  had  ceased,  so  tense  was  the  curiosity, 
so  impatient  were  the  counters  with  the  pause.  As  another 
salvo  rolled  over  the  city,  however,  the  roar  of  the  guns  was 
drowned  in  the  cheers  of  the  people. 

]\Ime.  Blanchard  sailed  away  in  a  balloon  to  scatter  printed 
bulletins  in  her  path  and  carry  the  tidings  beyond  the  rever- 
berations of  the  cannon.  The  semaphore  telegraph  flashed 
the  message  through  the  sunshine  that  suffused  the  natal 
day,  and  by  noon  the  cheers  were  rolling  over  the  Empire 
from  Lyons  to  Antwerp,  from  Brest  to  Strasburg. 


312  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

A  courier  raced  to  Vienna  with  a  jubilant  note  from  the 
father  to  the  grandfather,  and  another  sped  to  the  chateau 
of  Navarre,  where  the  next  day  the  door  of  Josephine 's  apart- 
ment was  noisily  thrown  open  by  an  usher,  who  cried,  "A 
message  from  the  Emperor!"  The  divorced  Em.press  read: 
"My  son  is  a  big,  healthy  boy.  He  has  my  chest,  my  mouth, 
my  eyes.     I  hope  he  will  fulfil  his  destiny." 

Josephine  disclosed  no  twinge  of  envy,  but  said  to  a  friend 
in  simple  sincerity,  "I  am  happy  to  see  that  the  sacrifice  I 
have  made  for  France  has  been  of  use,  and  that  the  country's 
future  is  assured.  How  happy  the  Emperor  must  be!" 
Alas,  the  gift  her  intuition  had  chosen  was  a  pin  for  a  girl 
baby !  One  day  she  was  to  receive  a  clandestine  visit  from 
the  child  in  the  little  chateau  of  Bagatelle,  at  the  edge  of  the 
Bois  de  Boulogne,  and  press  to  her  bosom  the  son  of  Na- 
poleon. 

Marie  Louise  enjoyed  a  speedy  convalescence,  leaving  her 
bed  when  the  baby  was  but  seventeen  days  old,  and  appearing 
before  the  public  on  the  terrace  in  the  garden  ten  days  later. 
The  infant  was  nursed  for  fourteen  months  at  the  breast  of 
the  wife  of  a  palace  mechanic,  and  the  maternal  instinct  seems 
never  to  have  been  very  deeply  aroused  in  the  girl  mother. 

Probably  the  little  fellow  was  oftener  in  the  arms  of  his 
father  than  of  his  mother.  The  Emperor  proudly  took  him 
to  the  palace  windows  to  show  him  to  the  people,  and  he  pre- 
sented him  before  the  imperial  guard  to  receive  his  first  salute. 

The  baptism  took  place  at  Notre  Dame  in  June,  when  the 
father  carried  his  child  from  the  font  to  the  porch  of  the 
great  cathedral  and  held  him  up  before  the  thousands  who 
crowded  the  open  space.  It  was  the  last  time  that  Napoleon 
and  Paris  were  to  rejoice  together.  Feasts  were  spread  in 
the  squares  and  the  beautiful  capital  gleamed  at  night  like  a 
gem-studded  crown. 

Princes  of  the  Empire  swarmed  the  city  and  deputations 
came  from  all  Europe  to  see  the  heir  of  the  master  of  mankind 
christened  Napoleon  Francis  Joseph  Charles  and  formally  in- 
vested with  the  proudest  of  titles,  the  King  of  Rome.  In  the 
Eternal  City  itself,  the  capitol  and  the  coliseum,  the  ancient 


THE  KING  OF  ROME  313 

arches  and  columns,  the  dome  of  St.  Peter's  and  the  castle  of 
St.  Angelo  blazed  with  illuminations  that  lit  up  the  seven  hills, 
and  Napoleon  decreed  that  the  successors  to  his  throne  should 
always  be  twice  crowned,  at  a  Roman  as  well  as  a  Parisian 
coronation. 

The  Emperor  followed  the  pompous  ceremony  at  Notre 
Dame  with  a  great  fete  for  the  populace  at  St.  Cloud.  Three 
hundred  thousand  people  feasted  and  sported  in  the  lovely 
park  of  that  chateau,  where,  in  the  evening,  the  noble  outlines 
of  the  palace  of  the  King  of  Rome  at  Chaillot,  which  the 
architects  already  had  designed,  were  traced  in  fire,  while  the 
flaming  crown  of  the  child  floated  in  the  sky,  where  it  had 
been  discharged  from  a  great  balloon.  Alas,  that  palace  at 
Chaillot  was  no  more  than  a  castle  in  the  air,  for  neither 
crowns  nor  palaces  was  the  King  of  Rome  to  possess. 

A  favourite  playtime,  when  the  infant  king  had  passed  into 
childhood,  was  at  the  Emperor's  breakfast,  when  he  liked  to 
hold  his  boy  on  his  knee,  perhaps  dipping  his  own  fingers 
into  some  sauce  and  smearing  the  little  face  with  it.  In 
another  scene  that  grew  familiar  to  the  court,  the  Emperor 
seated  on  his  sofa,  studied  state  papers  with  the  child  beside 
him,  or,  holding  him  in  his  lap,  he  sat  at  his  desk  scratching 
his  signature  on  orders  and  decrees  for  Europe  to  obey. 
When  his  infantile  majesty  tore  to  pieces  a  guardsman's  plume 
one  day  while  the  veteran  was  holding  him,  Duroc  told  the 
soldier  to  let  the  Prince  have  his  fun  and  he  gave  him  an  order 
for  two  plumes  to  take  its  place. 

The  governess,  ]\Ime.  de  Montesquieu — "Mamma  Que'' — did 
not  humour  the  King  in  his  naughtiness.  When  she  thought 
he  was  old  enough  to  know  better,  she  found  a  w'ay  to  bring 
him  out  of  a  spasm  of  screaming  rage.  She  simply  closed  all 
the  windows,  and  as  the  yelling  urchin  lying  on  the  floor  saw 
her  closing  them,  his  curiosity  was  aroused.  **I  did  it,"  the 
governess  soberly  explained,  "so  that  the  people  would  not 
hear  you.  For  the  French  never  would  have  a  king  who  be- 
haved so  badly  as  you  have  been  behaving." 

The  governess,  however,  was  alarmed  many  times  by  the 
seemingly  careless  and  sometimes  rough  manner  in  which  the 


314  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

eagle  played  with  his  tender  fledgeling.  He  tossed  him  about, 
boisterously  rolled  on  the  floor  with  him,  weighted  him  down 
with  a  big  sword  strapped  around  him,  gave  him  things  to 
eat  that  upset  his  stomach,  and  as  the  decorous  daughter  of 
the  Hapsburgs  wrote  her  father,  was  "very  childish  about 
him,"  If  the  child  cried  when  he  made  awful  faces  at  him, 
the  Emperor  rebuked  him.  "What!  A  king  and  crying! 
Fie!  Fie!"  Once  at  least  he  spanked  him  in  the  presence 
of  Talma,  the  tragedian,  but  only  for  the  "fun  of  spanking  a 
king." 

As  the  Russian  war  clouds  lowered,  the  Emperor  had  wooden 
blocks  of  man.y  kinds  and  colours  made,  representing  the  units 
of  an  army,  and  these  he  carefully  arranged  and  moved  about 
in  various  experimental  operations.  If  the  boy  chanced  to 
see  his  father  lying  on  the  floor  apparently  playing  with  those 
pretty  toys  he  naturally  insisted  on  taking  a  hand  in  the  game. 
Although  he  inevitably  brought  confusion  upon  the  thought- 
fully projected  manceuvres  in  which  the  Great  Captain  was  en- 
gaged, he  never  was  reprimanded  or  incurred  the  penalty  of 
a  frown. 

Out  at  Rambouillet  there  stands,  on  the  border  of  the 
chateau  park,  the  only  palace  the  fond  father  before  hastening 
to  his  fall  erected  for  his  son,  and  it  is  still  known  as  "le 
Palais  du  Roi  de  Rome."  Although  the  structure  is  the  size 
of  a  comfortable  three-story  dwelling,  it  was  meant  only  as 
a  playhouse  for  the  little  King,  where  from  a  mimic  throne 
he  could  hold  his  childish  court  and  amuse  himself  with  re- 
hearsals of  the  part  for  which  his  father  had  cast  him  in  the 
drama  of  life  when  he  should  be  the  lord  of  the  palaces  of 
Europe. 

In  the  shady  depths  of  the  park  at  Rambouillet  lies  the  very 
rock  on  which  all  the  hopes  of  father  and  son  were  wrecked. 
For  on  that  smooth-topped  stone  under  the  trees,  Napoleon 
spread  his  maps  in  May  of  1811,  and  planned  the  fatal  Rus- 
sian campaign  of  the  following  year.  And  alongside  the  w^all 
of  the  park  ran  and  runs  the  highway  to  Chartres,  to  Roche- 
fort  and  on  to  St.  Helena ! 

It  well  may  have  been  then  and  there,  by  that  rock  in  the 


Napoleon  and  His  Son,  by  Steuben 


THE  KING  OF  ROME  315 

forest  of  Rambouillet,  as  he  looked  np  from  his  map  to  see 
the  two  months'  old  King  reclining  in  his  baby  carriage,  that 
Napoleon  gave  the  sigh  echoed  by  history,  "Poor  child! 
What  a  snarl  I  shall  leave  to  you!"  But  fortune  held  the 
skein  and  the  great  fatalist  was  helpless  to  unravel  her 
tangled  web. 

That  the  birth  of  the  King  of  Rome,  and  the  realisation  of 
his  father's  longing  for  a  successor  to  perpetuate  his  dynasty, 
should  definitely  mark  the  beginning  of  the  end  of  the  Em- 
pire is  among  the  ironies  and  paradoxes  of  history.  But 
it  all  nicely  fits  into  the  logic  of  events.  For  with  the  com- 
ing of  the  baby,  Napoleon  viewed  the  completion  of  his  plan 
of  disconnecting  his  Empire  from  its  orginal  source  of 
power,  the  democracy,  and  of  connecting  it  with  another 
source,  the  old  principle  of  legitimacy  and  rule  by  right  divine. 

The  French  looked  on,  without  enthusiasm  and  with  many 
chilling  misgivings,  at  each  successive  step  he  had  taken  away 
from  them  and  back  toward  the  institutions  overthrown  in  the 
Revolution.  When  he  put  away  his  wife,  a  daughter  of 
France,  he  w^ounded  the  domestic  sentiment  of  the  nation  and 
weakened  the  chain  that  bound  the  people  to  his  monarchy. 
In  his  alliance  with  the  Hapsburgs  at  his  marriage  with  Marie 
Louise,  the  people  saw  the  dissolution  of  his  alliance  with 
them  and  they  awakened  to  the  regret  that  he  had  not  only  di- 
vorced himself  from  Josephine,  but  from  them  as  well. 

The  Emperor  remained  constant  to  the  Republic  only  in 
his  apparel.  Although  he  had  abolished  its  name  and  covered 
the  French  people  with  the  gold  braid  of  his  imperial  livery, 
he  reserved  for  himself  the  privilege  of  dressing  in  the  re- 
publican simplicity  of  the  Revolution.  He  had  only  two 
styles  of  clothing,  a  blue  coat  for  Sundays,  and  for  every-day 
wear  a  green  coat  with  a  single  row  of  white  buttons,  a  white 
waistcoat,  and  a  fresh  pair  of  white  knee  breeches  daily — be- 
cause he  would  wipe  his  quill  on  them — and  silk  stockings 
with  gold  buckles  on  his  shoes.  On  his  shoulders,  he  wore  the 
modest  epaulets  of  a  mere  colonel,  and  on  his  breast  a  silver 
decoration  of  the  Legion  of  Honour,  with  the  grand  cordon 
of  the  order  beneath  his  coat.     His  cravat  was  always  black. 


316     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"When  he  was  complaining,  "I  have  more  crowns  than  I 
know  what  to  do  with,"  he  still  wore  no  other  hat  than  the 
black  three-cornered  chapeau  of  revolutionary  days  with  its 
tricolour  cockade.  Sober  as  that  headgear  was,  he  was  par- 
ticular about  its  condition  and  quality,  buying  as  many  as  a 
score  of  hats  in  a  year — they  are  scattered  throughout  the 
museums  of  Europe — and  paying  $12  each  for  them.  More- 
over, Constant  always  had  to  break  them  in  by  wearing  them 
for  several  days  before  they  adorned  the  imperial  head. 

Enamelled  snuff  boxes  were  another  of  Napoleon's  few  ex- 
travagances. He  never  smoked,  and  he  took  snuff  rather  as 
a  nervous  habit  than  to  satisfy  any  craving  for  nicotine,  shak- 
ing far  more  of  the  powder  on  the  floor  or  ground  than  he  ever 
inhaled.  Cologne  was  still  another  of  his  indulgences.  His 
handkerchief  was  saturated  with  it.  His  hair  reeked  with 
it.  He  bathed  in  it  and  a  bottle  of  it  was  poured  over  his 
shoulders  every  morning. 

The  man  was  not  a  despot  from  vanity  so  much  as  from  a 
redundance  of  the  power  of  mastery,  with  which  his  nature 
was  endowed.  He  protested  in  all  good  faith  that  he  was  not 
over-ambitious.  He  was  like  a  giant  forest  king  which,  with 
its  far-running  roots  and  wide-spreading  branches,  dwarfs  its 
companions. 

Every  franc  spent  in  France,  in  Italy,  in  Belgium,  and  in 
his  widely  scattered  possessions  must  have  the  Emperor's  own 
approval.  "I  keep  the  key  of  the  treasury  always  in  my 
pocket,"  he  said.     He  trusted  no  subordinates. 

Every  movement  of  a  regiment  among  his  million  troops, 
every  appointment  of  a  second-class  clerk  must  have  his  sanc- 
tion, and  he  took  unto  himself  the  choice  of  all  the  municipal 
councillors  of  France.  As  Taine  said,  ' '  My  armies,  my  fleets, 
my  councils,  my  senate,  my  populations,  my  Empire,"  had 
come  to  be  Napoleon's  proprietary  tone.  For  awhile  he  kept 
the  name  of  the  Republic  in  the  Empire,  but  since  1807  he  had 
boldly  proclaimed  himself  ' '  Napoleon  by  the  grace  of  God  and 
the  constitution.  Emperor  of  the  French,  King  of  Italy  and 
Protector  of  the  Confederation  of  the  Rhine." 

Duroc  impatiently  chided  Dumas,  "You  always  commit  the 


THE  KING  OF  ROME  317 

same  fault;  you  will  answer  the  Emperor."  Yet  Goliier  says, 
"It  was  the  one  who  had  vexed  him  most  in  a  debate  whom  he 
generally  asked  to  dinner."  And  Caulaincourt,  whose 
candour  the  Emperor  admired,  and  trusted,  testified:  "Once 
the  first  irritation  was  past,  he  generously  forgave  offences." 
General  Rapp,  the  blunt  Alsatian,  never  ceased  to  speak  his 
mind  to  the  Emperor  or  to  command  his  regard.  "How  do 
your  Germans  like  these  little  napoleons?"  the  Emperor  asked 
one  day,  as  he  was  examining  a  new  vintage  of  twenty  franc 
gold  pieces.  "Better  than  the  great  one,  sire,"  the  soldier 
frankly  replied. 

The  Emperor  brooked  the  most  gross  insult  from  Talley- 
rand. He  came  back  from  Spain  to  learn  of  more  plotting 
on  the  part  of  his  grand  chamberlain,  and  he  fell  upon  him 
furiously.  When  the  imperial  storm  had  spent  itself,  Talley- 
rand turned  to  the  watching  courtiers  and  coldly  observed, 
"Is  it  not  a  pity  that  so  great  a  man  should  have  been  so 
poorly  brought  up  ! " 

In  the  nature  of  things,  a  despotism  never  relaxes,  but  al- 
ways tends  to  become  more  and  more  astringent,  since  it  de- 
stroys independence  and  initiative.  In  camp  and  court  alike, 
the  servitors  of  Napoleon  ceased  to  argue  with  him,  correct 
his  mistakes  or  even  to  address  him,  except  to  reply  to  his 
questions. 

The  nations  stood  hushed  in  the  presence  of  his  towering 
might.  As  many  as  thirty  persons  were  forbidden  to  assemble 
anywhere  in  France  without  a  license,  and  no  book  was  per- 
mitted to  be  put  on  sale  until  it  had  been  in  the  hands  of 
the  police  seven  days. 

Although  the  Emperor  had  suppressed  all  but  eight  news- 
papers in  Paris,  whose  combined  circulation  was  only  18,632 
copies,  the  few  survivors  continued  to  annoy  him.  Even 
while  he  revised  them  with  his  sword,  he  complained  that 
"the  newspapers  are  extremely  badly  edited."  He  scorn- 
fully held  the  journalist  to  be  "a  grumbler,  a  censurer,  a  giver 
of  advice,  a  regent  of  sovereigns,  a  tutor  of  nations.  Four 
newspapers  are  more  dangerous  than  100,000  soldiers  in 
arms. ' ' 


318  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Already  the  Emperor,  who  had  left  home  at  nine  and  been 
a  man  ever  since,  was  yawning,  "The  world  is  very  old,"  and 
was  vetoing  experiments.  ' '  Old  practices  are  worth  more  than 
new  theories,"  he  said.  Yet  it  was  only  a  dozen  years  since 
he  burst  upon  Europe  and  overwhelmed  her  with  the  power 
of  a  new  idea. 

In  an  autocracy  the  state  ages  with  the  autocrat.  Napoleon 
and  his  marshals  and  ministers  were  aging  fast.  By  reason 
of  the  pace  they  had  gone  they  were  prematurely  old.  The 
Emperor,  calculating  that  they  would  all  be  fifty  at  the  same 
time,  lamented  to  his  council  of  state  that  ^''ounger  men  could 
never  fill  their  shoes.  ' '  They  were  all  children  of  the  Revolu- 
tion," he  said,  "tempered  in  its  waters,  and  they  rose  from 
them  with  a  vigour  that  will  not  be  repeated." 

The  lean  and  hungry  Little  Corporal,  with  his  wagon 
hitched  to  his  star  and  dashing  forth  to  meet  victory,  had  now 
left  the  stage  to  the  sated  and  corpulent  Emperor,  who  was 
only  fully  aroused  at  the  approach  of  adversity.  His  ar- 
teries were  the  Empire's  as  well,  and  they  hardened  to- 
gether. "The  luxuries  of  royalty,"  he  confessed,  ''proved 
a  heavy  charge."  As  his  paunch  developed,  the  body  politic 
became  obese  and  his  increasing  sluggishness  was  communi- 
cated to  the  extremities  of  his  realm. 

His  work  was  done  or  as  nearly  so  as  he  could  do  it.  He 
had  carried  the  Revolution  to  the  borders  of  Russia.  He  had 
swept  aside  the  rubbish  of  the  ^liddle  Ages  and  opened  the 
way  for  a  new  era.  He  had  struck  feudalism  dead  beyond 
resurrection  and  crippled  class  privilege  beyond  repair. 
Even  in  setting  up  a  throne  for  himself,  he  had  disclosed,  as 
he  said,  that  thrones  are  "only  a  few  deal  planks"  and  thus 
he  had  stripped  kingcraft  of  its  divinity  forever. 

The  man  was  the  victim  of  his  own  success,  the  sport  of  his 
genius.  Each  triumph  of  his  arms  was  but  a  temptation  to 
seek  another.  The  birth  of  an  heir  only  inflamed  his  ambition 
to  enlarge  the  child's  heritage. 

His  estate  already  stretched  northward  from  the  Medi- 
terranean to  the  Baltic,  and  eastward  from  the  Bay  of  Bis- 
cay to  the  Ionian  Sea,  with  vassal  kings  and  allied  sovereigns 


THE  KING  OF  ROME  319 

standing  like  sentries  at  the  outposts  of  his  broad  dominions. 
Every  sword,  every  musket  between  Madrid  and  Warsaw  was 
at  his  command. 

He  had  eclipsed  the  mighty  empires  of  the  Assyrians,  the 
Babylonians  and  the  Persians,  of  Alexander,  Caesar  and 
Charlemagne.  Now  at  last  he  had  the  happy  promise  that 
his  sceptre  should  pass  to  no  unlineal  hand.  His  blood,  min- 
gled with  that  of  the  Caesars,  should  inherit  a  wider  rule  than 
ever  was  bequeathed  before.  Still  he  was  not  without  a  warn- 
ing premonition.  "It  will  last  as  long  as  I  last,"  he  said. 
"After  that,  my  son  may  deem  himself  fortunate  if  he  has 
$8000  a  year." 

Yet  he  could  not  stop.  "I  must  always  be  going,"  he  said. 
He  must  ever  go  on  building  higher  and  higher  on  the  ever 
narrowing  foundation  of  his  own  personal  despotism. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 

A  WORLD  AT  WAR 

1809-1812     AGE  39-42 

ON  the  eve  of  Napoleon's  disastrous  invasion  of  Eussia 
in  1812,  John  Quincy  Adams,  the  American  minister 
at  Petrograd,  was  discussing  the  impending  conflict, 
when  a  high  official  at  the  court  of  the  Czar  charged  it  to 
' '  Women,  women,  women ! ' '  They  were  responsible,  the 
American  minister  was  assured,  for  all  the  recent  wars  that 
had  convulsed  Europe.  Queen  Louise  had  fanned  the  flames  of 
the  FrancoPrussian  War  in  1806.  The  Empress  Marie  of 
Austria  had  stirred  up  the  strife  that  led  to  the  Wagram 
campaign  in  1809.  Now  a  Russian  Grand  Duchess  had 
brought  Russia  and  France  to  swords'  points. 

While  the  Europe  of  1812  was  no  garden  of  Eden  into 
which  it  remained  for  a  daughter  of  Eve  to  introduce  the 
serpent  of  strife,  there  was  enough  truth  in  the  remark,  which 
Adams  quotes  in  his  diary,  to  lend  a  faint  colour  to  its  ex- 
aggeration and  to  make  the  sister  of  the  Czar  Alexander  a 
figure  in  the  story  of  that  tragic  year.  She  was  the  wife  of 
the  Duke  of  Oldenburg,  and  Napoleon  having  found  the 
dreary  dunes  of  the  tiny  duchy  of  Oldenburg  in  his  way,  had 
annexed  to  his  empire  that  mere  handful  of  German  sand 
by  the  North  Sea.  The  Duchess  thereupon  returned  to  Rus- 
sia, carrying  her  bitter  grievance  with  her,  and  the  Dowager 
Czarina  and  the  Czar  took  up  her  quarrel. 

No  one  knew  better  than  John  Quincy  Adams,  however,  that 
the  fleets  of  Yankee  schooners  which  haunted  the  fogs  of  the 
Baltic,  bidding  defiance  to  the  British  blockade  of  the  sea  and 
the  French  blockade  of  the  land,  were  a  more  serious  cause 
of  estrangement  between  Napoleon  and  Alexander  than  the 

320 


A  WORLD  AT  WAR  321 

annexation  of  Oldenburs-.  No  doubt  an  immense  amount  of 
British  freiglit  was  being  dumped  at  Russian  ports,  mostly 
by  American  ships,  to  be  distributed  thence  over  Europe.  But 
while  Alexander  continued  to  exclude  British  vessels,  he 
declined  to  shut  out  those  from  the  United  States  and  other 
neutral  nations.  The  Czar  not  only  refused  to  comply  with 
the  commands  of  the  French  Emperor,  but  he  also  boldly 
challenged  him  by  prohibiting  the  entry  into  Russia  of  many 
French  manufactures,  on  the  ground  that  the  wealth  of  his 
empire  was  being  drained  to  pay  for  Parisian  luxuries.  And 
as  he  defied  him,  he  marshalled  his  military  forces  near  the 
frontier. 

The  sharp  bowsprit  of  the  New  England  schooner  thus  was 
the  entering  wedge  that  pried  apart  the  Emperor  of  the  east 
and  the  Emperor  of  the  west,  and  the  young  Republic  of  the 
New  World  was  a  factor  in  bringing  to  an  end  the  great  trade 
war  between  France  and  England,  which  began  with  Napo- 
leon's secret  purchase  and  then  his  hasty  sacrifice  of  Louisiana. 
For  nine  years  the  ruler  of  the  land  had  striven  with  the 
ruler  of  the  sea,  England  struggling  to  shut  the  highways  of 
the  ocean  and  Napoleon  the  gateways  of  the  European  con- 
tinent. First  and  last  both  had  been  baffled  by  the  daring  and 
enterprising  Yankee  skipper  more  than  by  any  other  element 
in  their  problem. 

To  shut  out  the  wares  of  British  manufacturers  and  the 
products  of  British  colonies,  Napoleon  had  marched  his  army 
from  the  harbour  of  Lisbon  to  the  banks  of  the  Niemen.  He 
had  gathered  all  the  nations  of  the  continent  beneath  his 
sword  in  a  continental  union  against  his  island  foe,  and  had 
erected  a  wall  of  China  around  Europe. 

Even  the  bayonets  of  a  million  soldiers,  however,  could  not 
close  the  immemorial  avenues  of  trade,  nor  could  Napoleon's 
big  broom  sweep  back  the  natural  currents  of  commerce.  The 
war  between  England  and  France  prostrated  the  honest  busi- 
ness of  the  continent  and  of  the  British  Isles  and  brought  on 
an  epidemic  of  bankruptcy,  but  the  ruined  merchants  were 
replaced  by  100,000  smugglers,  who  matched  their  wits  against 
an  army  of  customs  officials. 


322    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"When  at  last  the  Emperor  found  he  could  not  stop  smug- 
gling, he  adopted  a  system  of  licensing  it  and  sharing  in  its 
profits  by  taking  50  per  cent,  of  the  value  of  certain  kinds 
of  imports  offered  for  sale.  All  other  smuggled  goods  were 
confiscated  and  sold  at  great  auctions.  But  he  excepted  from 
the  auction  the  British  woollen  and  cottons  that  his  agents  had 
seized.  These  were  piled  in  heaps  and  destroyed  in  huge 
bonfires  that  lit  up  the  Empire.  All  letters  written  in  Eng- 
lish or  captured  in  transit  between  the  continent  and  the 
British  Isles  also  were  burned,  as  many  as  100,000  being  con- 
signed to  the  flames  on  an  appointed  day. 

Every  nation,  and  indeed  every  household,  felt  the  burden 
of  the  continental  system.  It  set  the  Empire  at  war  with  the 
church  itself,  although  the  Petrograd  official  well  might  have 
blamed  a  woman  for  that  quarrel,  and  an  American  woman. 
For  Betsy  Paterson  really  was  at  the  bottom  of  the  unhappy 
conflict  between  Rome  and  its  eldest  daughter. 

It  was  not  until  the  Emperor  asked  that  Jerome  Bona- 
parte's American  marriage  be  annulled  that  the  first  open 
breach  occurred.  The  ecclesiastical  authorities  found,  on  in- 
vestigation, that  the  ceremony  had  not  been  performed  in 
strict  conformity  with  a  decree  of  the  Council  of  Trent,  but 
it  was  also  found  that  this  latter  decree  never  had  been  pub- 
lished at  Baltimore  and  consequently  had  no  force  in  that 
diocese.  Pope  Pius  VII  replied  to  the  Emperor,  therefore, 
that  the  marriage  was  valid  and  that  he  was  powerless  to 
gratify  his  wish. 

It  may  easily  be  imagined  with  how  little  patience  Napoleon 
saw  his  purpose  balked.  Thenceforth  his  relations  with  the 
Pope  rapidly  went  from  bad  to  worse.  At  last  he  locked  up 
Pius  VII,  a  mild,  unaggressive  man  who  was  sixty-seven  when 
his  captivity  began,  cut  him  off  from  his  cardinals  and  coun- 
sellors, from  theological  books  and  papers,  and  from  all  com- 
munication with  the  church.  The  captive's  isolation  was  com- 
pleted by  the  silence  of  the  press,  which  was  forbidden  to 
allude  to  his  arrest  or  his  whereabouts. 

The  Pontiff  bore  his  immurement  with  becoming  resignation. 
"When,  however,  he  was  required  to  surrender  even  the  ring 


A  WORLD  AT  WAR  323 

of  the  Fisherman,  he  had  the  spirit  to  break  it  in  two  before 
handing  it  to  the  imperial  official.  ^Moreover,  he  established 
a  continental  blockade  of  his  own  against  Napoleon.  By  his 
refusal  to  confirm  bishops  for  the  Empire,  many  sees  became 
vacant,  and  the  machinery  of  the  church  throughout  the  im- 
perial dominions  was  thrown  into  a  vexatious  confusion. 
For  even  though  he  was  in  prison,  he  still  was  the  "Keeper 
of  the  Keys." 

Traditionally  and  instinctively  Napoleon  was  a  Catholic. 
For  instance,  in  the  presence  of  danger  or  upon  the  discovery 
of  some  important  fact,  it  was  his  habit  to  make  the  sign  of 
the  cross ;  but  his  imperious  will  refused  to  submit  itself  to  the 
authority  of  the  church  and  he  persistently  declined  to  go  to 
communion.  When  ]\Iarie  Louise  came  to  Paris,  she  asked 
the  archbishop  if  it  would  be  proper  for  her  to  receive  that 
sacrament.  The  prelate  excused  her  since  her  presence  at 
communion  might  only  emphasise  her  husband's  absence  and 
occasion  unpleasant  remarks. 

Neither  woman  nor  religion  really  was  responsible  for  the 
bitter  struggle  between  the  Emperor  and  the  Pope.  Its  true 
underlying  causes  were  cotton  and  calicoes,  coffee  and  sugar, 
rice,  tobacco  and  indigo.  Even  Napoleon's  own  brother,  the 
King  of  Holland,  rebelled  against  the  blockade.  At  last, 
when  20,000  imperial  troops  were  marching  on  Amsterdam  for 
the  purpose  of  more  effectually  closing  the  ports  of  the  coun- 
try, Louis  flung  away  his  crown  and  fled  to  Bohemia.  The 
Emperor  thereupon  annexed  Holland  to  France.  With 
Oldenburg  and  Bremen,  Hamburg  and  the  shore  beyond,  the 
Empire  now  stretched  to  the  boundary  of  Denmark. 

If  a  brother  was  the  first,  a  marshal  of  Napoleon's  was 
the  second  ally  to  desert  him.  The  King  of  Sweden  being 
without  an  heir,  some  Swedes  proposed  that  Marshal  Berna- 
dotte  should  be  adopted  as  the  successor  to  their  throne. 
Bernadotte  was  a  brother-in-law  of  Joseph  Bonaparte;  his 
son  Oscar  was  the  god-son  of  Napoleon,  and  the  Swedish  au- 
thorities innocently  supposed  that  the  selection  would  be 
highly  pleasing  to  the  Emperor. 

The  proposal  placed  Napoleon  in  a  predicament.     He  had 


324  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

every  reason  to  distrust  the  loyalty  of  Bernadotte.  Still  if 
he  consented  to  his  elevation,  the  marshal's  wife,  Desiree 
Clary,  would  get  a  crown  at  last.  Wherefore,  he  said  to  the 
candidate,  "Go,  and  let  our  destinies  be  accomplished." 
The  ex-sergeant  of  marines  went  forth,  therefore,  with 
the  Emperor's  blessing  and  a  large  gift  of  money  besides,  to 
found  a  royal  house  which  should  long  outlast  that  of  the 
Bonapartes. 

Russia  having  lately  taken  Finland  from  Sweden,  the  new 
crown  prince  began  a  campaign  to  repair  that  loss.  He 
proposed  to  take  Norway  from  the  crown  of  Denmark,  but 
Napoleon  would  not  consent  to  any  attack  on  his  Danish  ally. 
He  suggested  instead  that  if  Sweden  joined  him  against  Russia 
he  would  help  her  to  recover  Finland.  The  Emperor,  how- 
ever, in  his  purpose  to  close  tighter  the  ports  of  the  Baltic  to 
British  goods,  took  Swedish  Pomerania,  thereby  giving  mortal 
offence  to  the  Swedes  and  their  crown  prince. 

The  continental  system  had  now  openly  embroiled  Napoleon 
with  the  Pope,  the  Czar,  the  Swedes  and  with  his  brother 
Louis,  while  it  had  done  more  than  all  else  to  embitter  the 
various  peoples  of  Europe  against  him.  Its  entire  structure, 
which  for  years  he  had  been  laboriously  rearing,  was  rocking 
on  its  foundations  and  threatening  to  bury  him  and  his  throne 
beneath  its  wreckage. 

The  Empire  was  not  menaced  at  home,  but  from  abroad. 
The  people  within  its  wide-flung  borders  dwelt  in  peace  if 
not  in  prosperity.  They  never  gave  the  Emperor  a  moment 
of  uneasiness  while  he  sat  on  the  throne  and  they  never  for- 
sook him  as  long  as  he  held  aloft  a  standard.  For  fifteen 
years  his  great  realm  remained  as  tranquil  within  as  England 
or  the  United  States. 

Nor  did  he  hold  his  people  in  subjection  with  his  sword. 
Under  the  orders  of  the  incompetent  and  corrupt  Directory 
he  had  turned  his  guns  on  a  rebellious  population  at  the  steps 
of  the  Church  of  St.  Roch,  in  1795,  but  from  the  day  of  his 
own  rise  to  power  to  the  day  of  his  downfall  he  never  pointed 
a  cannon  except  at  alien  foes.  He  ruled  by  the  force  of  jus- 
tice and  wisdom  and  the  vanity  of  glory.     Victor  Hugo  once 


A  WORLD  AT  WAR  325 

said  that  the  two  greatest  things  of  the  nineteenth  century 
were  Napoleon  and  liberty.  As  long  as  France  had  the 
former  it  was  content  without  the  latter. 

While  the  lands  incorporated  in  the  Empire  remained  quiet, 
discontent  rose  and  spread  among  the  people  of  the  allied 
states,  which  Napoleon  had  subjugated  without  annexing. 
In  the  days  when  kings  and  grand  dukes  were  taking  orders 
like  field  hands  from  their  overseer  at  Paris,  when  the  Prus- 
sian monarch  was  limiting  his  army  to  the  number  specified 
and  dismissing  patriot  ministers,  when  the  Austrian  Emperor 
was  giving  his  daughter  in  marriage  to  the  conqueror,  book- 
sellers like  John  Palm,  gooseherds  like  Gneisenau,  cowherds 
like  Scharnhorst,  tavern  keepers  like  Andreas  Hofer,  simple 
souls  like  the  maid  of  Saragossa  were  lifting  from  the  dust  the 
standards  of  their  countries. 

In  the  course  of  the  long  struggle  Napoleon  had  changed  his 
base.  He  was  not  fighting  for  a  republic  now  but  for  a  crown. 
He  was  not  pulling  down  thrones  but  setting  them  up.  Kings 
had  become  his  allies  and  the  people  had  fallen  away  from 
him.  He  w^as  fighting  for  the  past,  not  for  the  future.  He 
was  looking  backward,  not  forward,  and  his  moral  retreat 
began  before  his  military  retreat. 

He  himself  once  computed  that  the  moral  force  in  war  is  as 
three  to  one  in  comparison  with  the  physical.  Thus  did  he 
mathematically  verify  Shakespeare's  line. 

Thrice  is  he  armed  that  hath  his  quarrel  just. 

By  that  measure.  Napoleon  lost  two-thirds  of  his  strength 
when  he  ceased  to  be  the  champion  of  freedom  and  progress, 
and  became  an  invader  and  conqueror.  As  the  moral  force 
passed  from  his  ranks  into  the  ranks  of  the  enemy,  he  sub- 
stituted batteries  for  it,  his  infantry  having  lost  its  old-time 
dash.  His  soldiers  had  taken  Italy  with  their  bare  hands, 
but  Wagram  was  distinctly  an  artillery  success.  ' '  The  poorer 
the  troops,"  he  said,  "the  more  artillery  they  need." 

Now  he  must  win  with  lead  where  once  he  won  with  hearts 
and  must  hurl  cannon  balls  at  the  lines  of  the  foe  which  in 
other  times  he  had  pierced  with  bayonets. 


326     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

As  his  army  lost  its  patriotic  fervor,  his  princely  and  ducal 
generals  lost  their  martial  ardour.  They  had  won  their  batons 
and  their  glory  fighting  for  France.  They  were  chary  of 
risking  their  laurels  with  degenerate  troops  in  campaigns 
that  did  not  awaken  any  national  enthusiasm.  In  their  ple- 
beian youth,  moreover,  they  had  no  other  roof  for  their  heads 
tlmn  where  they  nightly  pitched  their  tents  and  no  other  place 
to  go  than  war.  But  now  they  sighed  for  their  ducal  parks 
and  marble  halls  with  trains  attendant.  The  generous  rivalry 
of  young  hopes  and  ambitions  had  given  way  to  the  arrogant 
pride  and  bitter  jealousies  of  rank  and  wealth. 

The  army,  the  aristocracy,  the  whole  Empire  had  lost  the 
inspiring  illusions  of  youth.  They  had  all  gone  stale  when 
the  Emperor  accepted  the  challenge  of  the  Czar  and,  like  an- 
other Titanic  rushing  upon  an  iceberg,  hurled  himself  against 
the  Russian  Empire. 

His  independent  and  honest  counsellors  were  powerless  to 
arrest  him.  In  vain  the  economists  argued  that  Russia  had 
nothing  for  France  to  take.  In  vain  the  financiers  pleaded 
that  the  finances  of  the  Empire  needed  peace. 

With  the  Spanish  revolution  unsubdued  and  all  the  peoples 
about  his  Empire  ready  to  emulate  the  Spaniards,  he  yet  held 
to  his  course.  He  himself  had  already  foretold  his  fate  when 
he  said,  "I  shall  see  the  gulf  open  before  me  some  day,  but  I 
shall  not  be  able  to  stop  myself.  I  shall  climb  so  high  that 
I  shall  turn  giddy." 

No  longer  could  a  warning  voice  make  itself  heard.  His 
reasoning  often  was  darkly  mystical  and  fatalistic.  He  spoke 
in  1811  of  an  ''impulsion"  which  was  driving  France  and 
Russia  into  war.  "I  feel  myself  impelled  toward  a  goal 
with  which  I  am  unacquainted,"  he  said  as  if  in  a  trance. 
"When  I  shall  have  reached  it,  when  I  shall  be  no  longer 
needed  for  it,  an  atom  will  suffice  to  overthrow  me,  but  until 
that  moment,  all  efforts  will  be  powerless  against  me." 

Cardinal  Fesch  implored  him  not  to  fly  in  the  face  of  men, 
the  elements,  religion,  earth,  and  Heaven  or  he  would  sink 
under  the  combined  weight  of  their  enmity.  His  only  reply 
was  to  lead  his  uncle  to  a  window  and  point  to  a  star  of 


A  WORLD  AT  WAR  327 

destiny,  visible  only  to  his  own  eyes.  One  of  his  ministers 
shook  his  head  and  sighed,  "The  Emperor  is  mad,  completely 
mad,  and  will  destroy  us  all.  This  will  all  end  in  a  terrible 
crash ! ' ' 

Still  the  reasons  for  the  war  were  not  by  any  means  wholly 
occult.  Napoleon  had  been  trying  for  nearly  a  decade  to 
conquer  the  power  of  England  on  the  sea  by  closing  against 
her  trade  the  harbours  of  Europe.  If  one  remained  open  none 
would  remain  closed.  If  Russia  were  permitted  to  break  the 
blockade,  no  other  nation  could  be  asked  to  maintain  it  and 
it  would  be  only  a  matter  of  months  until  the  Czar  would  be 
able  to  form  a  new  coalition  against  France. 

Two  inveterate  enemies  of  Napoleon  had  entered  the  coun- 
sels of  the  Czar  and  were  industriously  strengthening  his  arm 
against  the  French  Emperor.  One  of  them  was  Stein,  the 
Prussian  cabinet  minister,  whom  the  Emperor  had  ordered 
the  King  of  Prussia  to  dismiss.  The  other  was  that  Corsican 
rival  of  Napoleon's  youth,  Pozzo  di  Borgo. 

Napoleon  and  Pozzo  had  left  Ajaccio  together,  the  one  to 
conquer  Europe,  the  other  to  wander  from  capital  to  capital 
in  his  bitter,  unceasing  efforts  to  thwart  him.  For  twenty 
years  the  two  Corsicans  carried  on  their  relentless  vendetta, 
with  a  continent  for  their  battle  ground. 

Pozzo  was  at  the  elbow  of  the  British  ministry  when  the 
Peace  of  Amiens  was  broken  and  the  twelve-year  duel  between 
England  and  France  began.  Next  he  went  to  Russia,  and 
was  with  the  Czar  in  the  years  he  was  warring  on  Napoleon. 
When  Napoleon  demanded  his  dismissal  at  Tilsit,  he  passed 
over  to  Austria,  where  he  fomented  the  war  of  1809.  Flee- 
ing from  Vienna  with  the  Austrian  court  as  the  Emperor  bore 
down  upon  that  capital,  he  escaped  him  only  by  tramping 
over  the  Balkan  mountains  to  Turkey.  From  Constantinople 
he  found  his  way  to  England  once  more,  and  finally  to 
Petrograd.  Thenceforth  he  dogged  the  do\\'nward  steps  of 
his  fellow-Corsican  to  Waterloo,  to  St.  Helena  and  to  the 
grave. 

A  great  war  somewhere  was  inevitable  to  establish  or  over- 
throw the  continental  svstem  which  rested  on  bavonets  and 


328  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

which  had  embroiled  the  world.  For  1812  proved  to  be  a  red 
year  in  histor}'.  The  flames  of  the  French  Revolution,  which 
were  kindled  at  the  Bastille  in  1789,  had  been  spreading  for 
twentj'-three  years.  At  last  they  had  leaped  the  wide  Atlan- 
tic, and  two  worlds  were  wrapped  in  an  almost  universal 
conflagration. 

The  Americans  and  the  British  took  up  arms,  and  the  In- 
dian with  his  tomahawk  joined  in  the  strife.  Already  Hi- 
dalgo had  rung  from  his  village  church  belfry  the  tocsin  of 
revolution  that  was  heard  from  the  Oregon  to  Terra  del 
Fuego,  and  Spanish  America,  taking  advantage  of  the  war  in 
Spain,  began  its  ten-year  struggle  for  independence.  The 
Spaniards  and  their  English  allies  under  Wellington,  after 
four  years  of  battling  on  the  Peninsula,  continued  to  baffle 
the  best  marshals  of  the  Empire.  Thus  while  an  imperial 
army  of  300,000  men  was  engaged  in  a  futile  effort  to  subdue 
one  extremity  of  Europe,  Napoleon  was  leading  600,000  more 
to  conquer  the  opposite  extremity  of  the  continent. 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 
ON  TO  MOSCOW 

1312      AGE  42-43 

WITH  the  Empress  seated  beside  him  and  his  trumpet- 
ers before  him,  with  his  court  and  his  servants  fol- 
lowing him  in  a  long  procession  of  coaches,  Napo- 
leon left  Paris  as  if  for  a  fete  on  a  beautiful  May  morning  in 
the  year  1812.  Crossing  France  and  the  Rhine,  he  entered 
Germany,  where  the  princes  of  his  allied  states  humbly  stood 
by  the  roadside  and  waited  to  make  their  obeisance  as  the  King 
of  the  Kings  of  the  earth  passed  by.  The  King  of  Saxony 
came  out  to  greet  the  master  from  whom  he  had  received  his 
royal  title  and  escort  him  to  Dresden,  where  the  Emperor  of 
Austria,  the  King  of  Prussia,  the  King  of  Bavaria  and  the  rest 
of  the  satraps  of  the  Empire  gathered  to  pay  court  to  the 
sovereign  of  them  all. 

As  Napoleon  had  gathered  the  Czar  and  his  other  allies  at 
Erfurt  in  1808  to  overawe  Austria,  he  assembled  the  Emperor 
of  Austria  and  his  allies  in  this  second  congress  of  kings  to 
let  the  Czar  see  that  the  monarchs  of  Europe  were  enlisted 
for  the  war  as  well  as  their  contingents  of  soldiers  in  the  great 
army  which  was  already  moving  toward  the  Russian  frontier. 
He  was  leaning  confidently  on  the  hope  that  a  demonstration 
in  force  would  bring  Alexander  to  terms  and  that  the  Russian 
sovereign  would  not  wait  for  him  to  invade  the  soil  of  his 
realm.  "Alexander  and  I,"  he  said  in  his  review  of  the 
campaign,  "were  in  the  position  of  two  boasters  who,  without 
wishing  to  fight,  were  endeavouring  to  frighten  each  other." 

When  the  Czar  disappointed  him  by  not  showing  any  sign 
of  flinching,  no  alternative  remained  to  him  but  to  dismiss 
his  satellites  and  proceed  to  Poland  and  East  Prussia  to  place 
himself  at  the  head  of  his  army.     "The  bottle  is  open,"  he 

329 


330  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

said,  ''and  the  wine  must  be  drunk."  How  bitter  its  dregs 
were  to  be,  no  foretaste  warned  him  as  he  left  the  beautiful 
city  by  the  Elbe,  into  which,  after  seven  months,  he  should 
silently  steal  back  at  night  in  a  sleigh,  his  army  lost,  and  with 
not  even  a  trooper  for  his  escort 

The  bayonets  of  more  than  600,000  men,  drawn  from 
twenty  nations,  ran  like  a  hedge  from  the  feet  of  the  Car- 
pathian Mountains  to  the  shores  of  the  Baltic.  Coming  from 
the  dunes  by  that  northern  sea,  from  the  polders  of  the 
Netherlands,  from  the  plains  of  Lombardy,  and  from  the 
shores  of  Calabria,  they  formed  the  greatest  army  Europe 
ever  had  seen.  All  the  races  of  the  Caucasian  world  were 
in  its  ranks,  and  all  the  tongues  of  Christendom  were  heard 
in  its  camps.  Perhaps  no  more  than  a  third  were  French. 
Certainly  more  than  a  fourth  were  Germans  from  the  Khine 
states.  There  were  30,000  Austrians,  under  Prince  Schwarzen- 
berg,  and  the  Prussians  numbered  20,000.  Prince  Eugene, 
Viceroy  of  Italy,  brought  80,000  Italians.  Prince  Poniatow- 
ski  had  60,000  Poles,  and  there  were  cohorts  of  Swiss,  Dutch, 
Croatians,  Spaniards  and  Portuguese. 

No  ties  of  blood  or  language  or  nationality,  no  sentiment  of 
patriotism  united  them.  No  conscious  purpose  animated 
them.  They  had  not  even  been  told  whom  they  were  to  hate 
and  why  they  were  to  slay.  And  less  than  ten  in  a  hundred 
could  read  a  line  of  print.  They  only  knew  they  had  been 
called  out  to  fight  for  Napoleon.  His  sword  had  drawn  them 
together  and  it  alone  must  hold  them  together. 

The  main  body  of  the  army  moved  over  the  wide  level  fields 
by  the  river  Pregel,  upon  which  the  traveller  to  Petrograd 
in  a  later  day  looks  from  the  car  window  of  his  Berlin  train 
when  he  approaches  the  portals  of  the  strange  land  of  Muscovy. 
Although  it  is  only  an  imaginary  line,  no  other  frontier  the 
world  round  so  stirs  the  imaginings.  In  a  time  of  peace  one 
looked  in  vain  for  visible  signs  of  it.  No  great  military 
fortifications  were  to  be  seen  frowning  across  the  chalk  line 
that  demarks  the  Empire  of  the  Kaisers  from  the  Empire  of 
the  Czars. 

Although  the  Occident  visibly  thinned  out  and  tapered  off 


ON  TO  MOSCOW  331 

through  the  closing  hours  of  the  trip  from  Konigsberg,  Inster- 
burg,  Gumbinnen  and  Eydtkuhnen,  the  last  towns  in  Ger- 
many, were  as  resolutely  Germanic  as  any  place  between  the 
Rhine  and  the  Niemen.  German  faces  and  German  moustaches, 
German  caps  and  German  breweries  still  boldly  asserted  their 
nationality.  But  the  German  station  master  at  Eydtkuhnen 
rang  the  warning  bell,  and  the  train  had  hardly  more  than 
pulled  out  of  that  German  station  than  a  little  brook  was 
crossed — and  all  things  changed  in  a  twinkling. 

That  little  brook  is  the  moat  between  Germany  and  Russia, 
between  the  Teuton  and  the  Muscovite,  between  the  west  and 
the  east.  While  the  train  was  crossing  the  brook,  a  lightning 
change  of  scene  took  place  that  would  do  credit  to  the  mech- 
anism of  the  theatrical  stage.  In  the  brief  course  of  a  jour- 
ney of  only  a  mile  between  the  German  frontier  station,  at 
Eydtkuhnen,  and  the  Russian  frontier  station  at  Wirballen, 
one  civilisation  vanished  and  another  replaced  it. 

Toward  the  Russian  frontier  Napoleon's  legions  moved  in 
a  front  of  400  miles.  Thus  widely  spread  out,  the  oncoming 
host  of  twenty  nations  bewildered  the  Czar  and  his  generals. 
There  were  250,000  armed  serfs  drawn  up  to  defend  the 
frontier  but  the  Russian  commanders  dared  not  concentrate 
their  forces  since  the  point  of  Napoleon's  invasion  was  un- 
known. The  handsome  Czar  himself  had  come  from  Petro- 
grad  to  an  outpost  of  his  empire  and  made  his  headquarters 
in  the  town  of  Vilna.  There  he  w^as  waiting  and  watching 
when  the  French  Emperor  swept  down  from  the  Baltic.  The 
plumes  of  King  Murat  waved  at  the  head  of  a  magnificent 
body  of  cavalry ;  another  army  marched  under  Prince  Eugene 
and  a  third  under  the  command  of  King  Jerome  of  West- 
phalia. 

Napoleon's  first  purpose  was  to  push  back  the  boundary' 
line  of  Russia,  which  had  been  stealthily  moving  westward 
over  prostrate  Poland.  But  he  failed,  and  at  his  downfall 
Russia  crept  still  farther  forward,  gathering  in  most  of  the 
territory  of  the  Grand  Duchy  of  Warsaw.  The  railway  pas- 
senger therefore  rides  fifty  miles  into  the  Empire,  as  it  now 
is,   before   he   comes  to  the   frontier  that  Napoleon  crossed. 


332  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"when  he  found  the  boundary  in  the  middle  of  the  Niemen 
at  Kovno. 

A  little  way  out  of  Kovno,  there  is  a  steep,  round  hill. 
The  townspeople  still  call  it  the  Hill  of  Napoleon,  since  from 
its  crown  he  looked  across  the  river  one  morning  in  the  fourth 
week  of  June,  1812.  He  had  discarded  the  too  well  known 
three-cornered  black  hat  and  green  coat,  and  had  disguised 
himself  in  the  cap  and  cloak  of  a  Polish  soldier  of  his  Guard. 
Standing  there  at  the  top,  with  his  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
soldiers  swarming  the  forest  behind  him  and  with  Russia  ly- 
ing only  over  beyond  the  narrow  stream,  he  hummed  his  war 
song  while  he  spied  out  the  best  place  for  throwing  his 
bridges. 

The  Russians  have  a  saying,  ' '  The  gates  of  Russia  are  wide 
to  those  who  enter,  but  narrow  to  those  who  go  out."  That 
would  be  a  fitting  inscription  for  the  pedestal  of  a  monument 
which  stands  in  the  square  before  the  Hotel  de  Ville  at  Kovno. 
For  the  Hill  of  Napoleon  is  not  the  only  souvenir  of  its  im- 
mortal but  uninvited  guest  which  the  town  cherishes.  On 
that  shaft  in  the  square,  which  was  set  up  by  the  Czar  Alex- 
ander, this  grim  tale  is  carved : 


RUSSIA, 

Surprised  m  1812  by  an  Army  of  700,000 

Men, 

Only  70,000  Repassed  Her  Frontier. 


The  monumental  stone  was  yet  unquarried  and  the  Czar 
was  at  ,Vilna,  sixty  miles  away,  when  at  midnight  three  pon- 
toons being  completed,  the  men  of  twenty  nations  began  to 
pour  out  of  the  forest  and  flow  in  torrents  upon  the  unde- 
fended Russian  shore.  That  bank  of  the  Niemen  at  Kovno, 
therefore,  well  may  be  called  the  high-water  mark  of  the  red 
tide  of  the  French  Revolution.  It  was  there  that  the  mighty 
force  which  took  its  rise  when  the  French  people  burst  the 
old  Bourbon  dam,  broke  and  spent  itself  on  the  sandy  wastes. 


ON  TO  MOSCOW  333 

The  Russian  commanders,  as  Napoleon  intended  they 
should,  had  divided  their  armj^  when  they  saw  his  multitudes 
flowing  upon  them  from  every  direction.  Thus  separated,  it 
was  impossible  for  them  to  make  a  stand.  While  the  two 
Russian  armies,  therefore,  fell  back  in  an  effort  to  get  together 
and  present  a  solid  front.  Napoleon  moved  forw'ard  between 
them  in  an  effort  to  keep  them  apart  and  destroy  them  singly. 

He  was  disappointed  at  the  outset  of  the  campaign,  when, 
after  making  preparations  to  fight  for  a  foothold  on  the  banks 
of  the  Niemen,  he  was  permitted  to  cross  unmolested  and  was 
welcomed  to  a  desolate  shore.  Dashing  oft'  to  Vilna  the  next 
day  with  the  Guard,  he  marched  for  three  days  through  a 
terrible  tempest  of  rain  and  sleet  and  wind,  unchallenged  ex- 
cept by  roaring  and  flashing  thunderbolts,  the  Russian  out- 
posts everywhere  vanishing  like  deer  into  the  depths  of  the 
forests.  Already  the  climate,  with  its  sudden  and  fierce  varia- 
tions, was  collecting  its  toll,  and  10,000  horses  had  perished, 
frozen  to  death  in  June! 

As  Napoleon  neared  Vilna  not  a  bayonet  remained  to  de- 
fend it.  Surprise  and  anger  clouded  the  Emperor's  brow 
when  he  entered  the  gate  of  that  capital  of  Lithuania. 

The  Napoleon  of  Rivoli,  of  Egypt,  of  Marengo,  of  Austerlitzi, 
would  have  left  the  abandoned  town  of  Vilna,  and  raced  after 
the  retreating  foe.  Alas,  the  Napoleon  who  sat  down  there  for 
seventeen  days  was  no  longer  the  eagle  that  once  flew  over 
mountains  and  deserts.  At  Austerlitz  he  had  foretold  the 
change:  "I  shall  be  good  for  only  six  years  more  of  war." 
Those  six  years  and  more  had  now  rolled  over  his  care-bur- 
dened head.  They  had  left  in  his  face  "two  creases,  which 
extended  from  the  base  of  the  nose  to  the  brow,"  and  soft 
indulgences  had  turned  his  muscles  of  steel  to  fat,  inclining 
him  to  the  couch  rather  than  the  saddle. 

The  swift  Napoleonic  fashion  of  warfare  was  as  athletic 
as  the  sports  of  the  ring  or  the  diamond,  and  the  Emperor's 
forty-two  years  weighed  upon  him  as  heavily  as  upon  a  pugil- 
ist or  a  ball-player.  So  the  warrior,  famoused  for  fight, 
tarried  at  Vilna  almost  as  long  as  it  took  him  to  finish  his 
Marengo,  Ulm,  Austerlitz  or  Jena  campaigns. 


334    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"While  he  la}^  on  the  floor  with  his  head  close  to  such  maps 
as  he  could  get — for  like  Alexander  of  IMacedon  and  Fred- 
erick the  Great,  he  was  near-sighted — he  scolded  Prince  Eu- 
gene, ]\Iarshal  Davout,  and  King  Jerome  for  not  rounding  up 
the  enemy.  Week  after  week,  the  marshals  of  France  ranged 
the  Lithuanian  'udlderness  without  running  down  the  foe,  and 
they  lost  men  and  horses  faster  than  they  ever  had  seen  them 
fall  on  the  battlefield.  Torrential  downpours  washed  away  the 
cart  tracks  which  served  as  roads  and  the  supply  trains  were 
stalled.  With  nothing  to  eat  but  green  rye  and  the  thatch 
torn  from  the  roofs  of  the  people's  huts,  the  horses  sickened 
and  died  by  the  thousands  on  every  march.  Already  the 
cavalry  were  being  dismounted.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Cos- 
sack horse  of  the  Russian  cavalry  was  inured  to  privation  and 
had  the  tastes  and  digestion  of  the  goat. 

The  invading  soldiers  soon  were  on  short  rations,  and  passed 
in  a  rapid  descent  from  wine  and  brandy  to  beer,  then  to 
the  stupefying,  brutalising  native  intoxicant,  vodka,  or  to 
muddy  swamp  water.  Foraging  in  a  land  grubbed  by  the 
retreating  Russians,  was  miserably  poor.  The  houses  a  mile 
apart  were  mostly  \^T:*etched  dens  more  fit  for  bears  than  hu- 
man beings.  The  foreigners  could  well  starve  on  what  suf- 
ficed the  troops  of  the  Czar,  who  drew  his  soldiers  from  the 
estates  of  the  nobles,  and  the  landlords  naturally  sent  him  their 
poorest  serfs.  The  strangers  could  not  swallow  the  native 
bread.  Some  grenadiers  happening  upon  a  large  quantity 
of  the  very  acme  of  Russian  delicacy,  were  greasing  their 
boots  with  it  when  an  officer,  a  Parisian  gourmet,  rescued  the 
caviare  from  such  base  use. 

The  dreary,  dead  level  monotony  of  Russia,  with  its  squalid 
villages,  its  unkempt  fields  and  melancholy  forests  of  fir,  alder. 
and  willow,  oppresses  the  spirit  of  a  traveller,  who  passes  it 
in  review  from  his  car  window  at  the  rate  of  thirty  miles  an 
hour.  It  utterly  overwhelmed  many  sensitive  natures  in  the 
Grand  Army  as  they  marched  and  counter-marched  under 
the  blazing  sun  or  through  wild  blizzards. 

The  men  dared  not  lay  down  their  arms  for  a  minute,  step 
out  of  the  ranks  or  go  anywhere  except  in  strong  bands,  for 


ON  TO  MOSCOW  335 

the  dreaded  Cossacks  seemed  always  to  be  lurking  in  the 
gloomy  shadows.  The  French  ceased  to  curse,  and  the  Ger- 
mans ceased  to  sing.  Homesickness  became  a  well-defined 
and  widely  prevalent  disease.  Not  a  few  forlorn  boys  leaned 
their  heads  on  their  muskets  and  chose  to  look  in  the  muzzles 
rather  than  endure  the  anguished  longings  for  their  own  fair 
lands. 

In  five  weeks  the  Grand  Army  made  only  250  miles.  That 
advance,  although  unopposed  by  any  enemy  in  arms,  had  cost 
it  nearly  a  third  of  its  strength.  One  of  the  German  divisions 
had  lost  a  full  half  of  its  men.  Of  the  360,000  in  the  columns 
that  had  crossed  the  Niemen  at  Kovno,  only  250,000  remained, 
flung  out  along  a  front  of  150  miles. 

For  fifteen  days  the  Emperor  tarried  at  the  city  of  Vitebsk. 
He  tore  down  houses  about  his  headquarters  in  the  town  to 
give  him  an  open  space  on  which  to  review  his  troops,  and 
he  appealed  to  the  imperial  librarian  at  Paris  for  some 
"amusing  books"  as  he  had  ''moments  of  leisure  not  easy  to 
fill  here."  After  losing  that  precious  fortnight  and  more  of 
the  short  summer,  he  left  the  city  by  the  Duna  and  crossed 
over  the  Dneiper,  the  great  river  of  ]\Iuscovt»',  down  which 
Odin  and  Rurik,  with  the  fierce  multitudes  of  the  north,  had 
journeyed  to  the  Black  Sea  and  descended  upon  Constan- 
tinople. 

Onward  the  Grand  Army  toiled  out  of  Lithuania  into  the 
real  Russia,  into  "AVhite  Russia,"  until  it  stood  before  the 
many  towered  brick  wall  of  sacred  Smolensk,  whose  white 
domes  gleam  in  the  sun  on  the  heights  above  the  Dneiper. 
When  Napoleon  learned  that  the  Russian  armies  were  together 
and  united  for  the  defence  of  the  city,  he  clapped  his  hands 
and  rejoiced,  "At  last  I  have  them." 

Again,  however,  he  lost  a  day  before  closing  in  upon  the 
elusive  foe,  and  it  was  noon  of  the  following  day  when  his 
batteries  opened  fire.  All  afternoon  the  walls  of  the  city 
withstood  a  pelting  hail  of  lead,  though  the  wooden  houses  be- 
hind it  repeatedly  caught  fire.  At  the  late  setting  of  the 
northern  sun,  Smolensk  still  defied  its  assailants. 

The  fires  within  the  walls  continued  to  spread  through  the 


336  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

night.  They  cast  a  glare  upon  Napoleon's  face  as  he  sat  be- 
fore the  door  of  his  tent,  gazing  at  the  burning  to\^^l.  "When 
the  sun  rose  after  a  brief  August  night,  its  first  rays  disclosed 
the  battered  walls  without  a  defender  mounted  upon  them 
and  the  city  wrapped  in  silence  and  in  flames. 

The  quarry  had  escaped  again,  and  the  inhabitants  had 
fled  after  the  soldiers.  Instead  of  destroying  the  enemy  and 
capturing  a  rich  city,  Napoleon,  at  the  cost  of  12,000  men, 
had  conquered  another  desolation  as  useless  as  the  wilds  of 
Lithuania, 

He  was  now  nearly  400  miles  from  the  frontier  and  still 
without  the  decisive  battle  that  he  had  expected  to  deliver 
as  soon  as  he  entered  the  dominions  of  the  Czar.  As  he  had 
marched  deeper  and  deeper  into  the  vast  Russian  wastes,  and 
farther  and  farther  into  the  short  Russian  summer,  he  had 
looked  upon  Smolensk  as  the  goal  of  his  campaign.  But  its 
warehouses  were  burned  or  empty,  and  the  invader  had  to 
bivouac  on  the  ashes  of  the  city.  There  were  no  supplies  for 
the  men  and  the  animals.  And  a  hungry  army  cannot  stand 
still  in  the  presence  of  starvation. 

Hour  after  hour  the  Emperor  faced  the  hard  choice  pre- 
sented to  him,  murmuring  as  he  paced  his  headquarters  and 
debated  with  himself.  Should  he  stop  or  turn  back  or  go 
on  ?  The  problem  really  had  passed  beyond  his  own  decision. 
In  supreme  emergencies  the  will  of  an  army  always  overrules 
the  will  of  its  commander.  "When  the  soldiers  have  had 
enough  of  fighting,  the  battle  is  ended,  regardless  of  the  wishes 
of  the  general.  When  they  are  starving,  they  can  be  suc- 
cessfully marched  only  in  the  direction  of  food. 

With  nothing  but  starvation  and  disease  behind  him  and 
the  ruins  of  a  burned  and  deserted  city  about  him.  Napoleon 
passed  out  of  the  gate  of  Smolensk  in  the  middle  of  a  night 
late  in  August  and,  on  the  heels  of  the  ever-retreating  Rus- 
sians, took  the  road  to  Moscow.  Meanwhile  the  Czar  was 
vowing  to  his  British  military  adviser,  Sir  Robert  Wilson, 
"I  would  sooner  let  my  beard  grow  to  my  waist  and  live  on 
potatoes  in  Siberia  than  permit  any  negotiation  with  Napoleon 
while  an  armed  Frenchman  remains  on  the  soil  of  Russia." 


ON  TO  MOSCOW  337 

After  Kutusof,  the  Russian  commander,  had  fallen  back  to 
within  seventy-five  miles  of  Moscow,  he  yielded  to  the  pres- 
sure of  his  officers  and  men  and  of  the  indignant  nobles  of  that 
city.  Against  his  own  instincts,  he  took  a  stand  at  last,  and 
drew  up  his  120,000  soldiers  across  the  road  where  it  passes,  at 
the  village  of  Borodino,  over  a  branch  of  the  Moskva  river. 

There  he  paraded  before  his  kneeling  warriors  a  most  ven- 
erated image  of  the  Holy  Virgin,  while  the  priests  of  the 
Greek  church  gave  them  absolution  and  the  injunction  to 
die,  if  they  must,  to  save  the  Holy  City  of  Russia  from  the 
sacrilegious  hordes  of  the  west.  It  was  equally  characteristic 
of  Napoleon,  on  the  other  hand,  to  display  to  his  Guard  on  an 
easel  in  front  of  his  tent  a  large  portrait  of  the  King  of  Rome, 
which  Marie  Louise  had  sent  him  from  Paris. 

The  story  of  the  battle  is  not  a  tale  of  strategy  and  sur- 
prises, but  of  stubborn  ferocity  on  both  sides  and  headlong 
plunges.  Nor  did  Napoleon  sit  his  white  Arab  as  at  Auster- 
litz,  manoeuvring  his  forces  like  a  switchman  in  his  tower. 
On  the  contrary,  he  chose  a  point  of  observation  on  a  hill 
three  quarters  of  a  mile  from  the  front  of  his  army.  There 
he  sat  on  a  camp  stool  with  his  feet  on  a  drum,  sometimes  ap- 
parently asleep.  He  rose  from  time  to  time  to  rest  his  tele- 
scope on  a  guardsman's  shoulder,  or  again,  in  an  effort  to 
warm  his  feet,  he  paced  back  and  forth  a  few  minutes  until 
the  slight  exertion  seemed  to  have  exhausted  him. 

He  did  not  mount  his  horse  in  the  course  of  the  long,  hard 
fought  day  until  the  fighting  virtually  was  at  an  end.  A 
painful  functional  disorder  is  said  to  have  unfitted  him  for 
the  saddle,  and  a  severe  cold — Constant  had  neglected  to  give 
him  his  waterproof  boots  the  day  before — left  him  dull  and 
inert  and  hardly  able  to  speak. 

The  two  armies  were  about  equal  in  numbers.  The  brutal 
and  deadly  tempest  of  fire  and  death  raged  from  six  to  six, 
when  the  Russians,  with  nearly  40,000  of  their  comrades 
fallen  about  their  feet,  sullenly  gave  way.  But  they  retired 
slowly  and  in  good  order  only  a  few  paces  from  the  crim- 
soned field.  There  they  chanted  their  Te  Deums  and  boasted 
of  victory  in  the  hearing  of  their  foes,  whose  own  loss  of  al- 


338  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

most  thirty  thousand  made  up  an  awful  total  that  gave  the 
battle  the  unhappy  distinction  of  being  the  bloodiest  of  the 
nineteenth  century. 

When,  the  next  morning,  the  Eussians  resumed  their 
retreat  and  the  Grand  Army  its  advance  from  Borodino,  the 
famished  invaders  were  spurred  forward  by  their  longing  for 
the  fat  larders  and  the  fabled  riches  of  Moscow.  It  was  the 
one  hope  left  them  and  '  *  a  Moscou !  a  Moscou ! ' '  was  the  last 
remaining  cry  to  stir  their  wasted  ranks. 

Necessity  had  become  the  mother  of  Napoleon's  strategy. 
He  only  obeyed  the  instincts  of  his  famished  soldiers  in  ven- 
turing beyond  Smolensk.  As  he  promised  them  in  his  bul- 
letins, "You  shall  see  Moscow,"  he  promised  himself,  "Peace 
waits  for  me  at  the  gates  of  Moscow;"  but  Prince  Eugene 
came  away  from  his  stepfather  sighing,  "Moscow  will  be  our 
ruin. ' ' 

The  bottle  was  open  and  the  wine  had  to  be  drunk ! 


CHAPTER  XL 

THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD 

1812      AGE   43 

HIGH  above  a  graceful  bend  in  the  Moskva  river,  rises 
the  most  renowned  of  the  seven  hills  of  the  Russian 
Rome.  On  that  Hill  of  the  Pilgrim,  or  Hill  of  Salu- 
tation, the  pilgrims  were  wont  to  bow  in  awe  and  cross  them- 
selves while  they  saluted  "Holy  Mother  Moscow."  There, 
too,  the  poor  wretches  condemned  to  a  Siberian  exile  were 
privileged  to  pause  and  feast  their  sad  eyes  before  taking  up 
their  chains  for  the  long  march  to  the  grave  of  the  living 
dead. 

Vulgarly  the  height  is  called  Sparrow  Hill,  and  its  cafes 
now  are  the  resort  of  the  tea  bibbers  of  the  city.  Close  by 
where  the  samovars  are  enthroned  to-day.  Napoleon  stood  on 
a  sunny  afternoon  in  September,  1812.  Looking  across  the 
wide  fields  of  the  convent  in  the  river  bed,  he  gazed  upon 
the  ivory  white  walls  and  gaily  painted  roofs,  upon  the  forest 
of  spires,  towers,  pinnacles,  and  minarets,  upon  the  countless 
domes  of  gold  and  green  and  blue  that  form  the  unique  and 
dazzling  panorama  of  Moscow.  "It  is  time !  it  is  time ! "  he 
sighed  as  his  eyes  rested  on  the  city  of  many  and  wonderful 
colours,  where  the  sunbeams  turned  to  shimmering  gold  the 
lacy  chains  falling  like  veils  over  the  eight  pointed  Russian 
crosses,  which  sprang  from  their  crescents  as  if  to  symbolise 
the  triumph  of  the  Christian  over  the  IMoslem. 

He  had  paid  a  terrible  price  for  that  sight  from  Sparrow 
Hill,  but  then  it  was  one  that  never  before  had  been  beheld  by 
a  conqueror  out  of  the  west.  Did  not  the  tears  freeze  on  the 
youthful  cheeks  of  Charles  XII  of  Sweden  because  he  was  de- 

339 


340     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

nied  the  joy  of  looking  upon  those  clustered  towers  of  the 
Kremlin  ? 

With  Moscow  at  his  feet,  all  the  capitals  of  the  European, 
continent  had  knelt  and  kissed  the  sword  of  Napoleon.  Mos- 
cow had  cost  him  dear,  but  it  was  the  rarest  in  his  collection. 
Before  possessing  himself  of  his  fair  captive,  of  this  Oriental 
beauty  that  he  had  spent  200,000  lives  to  win,  he  wished  to 
gratify  his  dramatic  sense  and  thrill  the  world  by  making  an 
imposing  spectacle  of  her  abject  surrender  and  of  his  own 
magnanimity. 

While  he  waited  for  his  vanguard  to  arrange  a  fitting  cere- 
monial of  the  delivery  of  the  keys,  the  city  of  the  Czars  lay 
as  if  in  a  languorous  afternoon  slumber  on  the  banks  of  the 
]\Ioskva.  No  murmur  rose  from  behind  her  walls.  Not  a 
wreath  of  smoke  floated  above  her  chimneys. 

The  report  crept  up  the  hill  that  Moscow  was  deserted  and 
that  even  its  keys  were  gone.  The  startling  rumour  sank  to  a 
whisper  as  it  reached  the  outer  circle  of  the  group  about 
Napoleon.  AVhen,  at  last,  some  one  dared  repeat  it  to  him,  he 
refused  to  believe  it  and  despatched  members  of  his  staff  into 
the  mute  city  to  search  out  the  members  of  the  nobility  in 
their  hiding  places. 

In  their  Spanish  pride,  the  people  of  Madrid  had  hid  from 
him  but  they  had  not  fled  their  homes  and  forsaken  their 
capital.  A  city  of  300,000  depopulated?  The  sacred  city  of 
the  empire  abandoned?  All  those  great  palaces  deserted? 
The  altars  of  those  300  churches  untended?  C'est  impos- 
sible !  Even  when  convinced  of  the  truth,  he  persisted  in  his 
desire  for  a  ceremony.  Declining  to  enter  the  city  until  the 
next  day,  he  passed  the  night  in  the  odorous  squalor  of  an 
abandoned  house  by  one  of  the  gates. 

Moscow  was,  indeed,  almost  a  solitude.  As  the  Russian 
army,  under  General  Kutusof,  retreated  from  Borodino  the 
morning  after  the  frightful  battle,  Moscow  had  clamoured  in 
vain  for  military  protection.  When  Kutusof  called  a  council 
of  war,  it  voted  to  stand  or  fall  for  the  salvation  of  the  sacred 
town.  But  he  ignored  the  decision  and,  with  tears  in  his 
eyes,   marched  through  Moscow,  leaving  it  defenceless. 


THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD       341 

The  inhabitants  rose,  and  crowded  the  gates  in  a  flight  on 
the  heels  of  the  retreating  army.  In  the  instinctive  repug- 
nance of  a  primitive  patriotism,  they  scorned  to  stay  and 
breathe  an  atmosphere  polluted  by  the  presence  of  an  alien 
conqueror. 

Leaving  their  altars  and  turning  their  backs  on  their 
homes  and  their  churches,  bearing  aloft  their  revered  ikons 
and  singing  plaintive  songs,  the  people  passed  out  of  the  city 
in  long  processions.  The  great  nobles  forsook  their  splendid 
palaces  and  spacious  parks  and  drove  away  in  their  brilliant 
four  and  six-horse  equipages,  their  thousands  of  serfs  run- 
ning after  them.  The  rich  merchants  left  their  warehouses 
and  shops  filled  with  unguarded  wealth,  and  joined  in  the 
exodus.  The  rest  of  the  population  rushed  into  the  coun- 
try, with  no  thought  of  where  they  should  find  food  or  shelter. 

The  governor  unlocked  the  gates  of  the  prisons  and  the  ar- 
senals, and,  rolling  barrels  of  vodka  out  of  the  liquor  ware- 
houses, he  left  them  standing  open  in  the  streets.  Having  thus 
given  Moscow  over  to  armed  and  drunken  criminals  and 
vagrants,  he  slipped  out  of  his  back  door  and  stole  away  in 
the  rear  of  the  fugitive  populace. 

Even  while  the  people  were  still  pouring  out  of  the  farther 
gates  of  Moscow,  the  towers  of  the  abandoned  city  rose  to  the 
view  of  the  hungry,  dirty,  sadly  reduced  army  of  twenty  na- 
tions. Never  suspecting  the  desolation  that  lay  before  them, 
the  soldiers  raised  the  exultant  cry,  ' '  IMoscow !  INIoscow ! 
Moscow!  at  last!"  To  them  the  name  meant  food  and  drink 
and  rest,  and  they  were  as  impatient  and  eager  as  a  weary 
traveller,  who,  after  a  long  journey,  comes  in  sight  of  home. 

Murat's  cavalry  dashed  into  the  city,  but  only  to  find  in 
all  the  wilderness  of  houses  and  streets  a  few  thousand  people, 
among  them  the  brutish  jail  birds  who  had  rushed  out  of  the 
open  gates  of  their  prisons.  Except  for  these  and  the  help- 
less sick  and  wounded  in  the  hospitals,  the  great  city  was  a 
desert.  The  candles  still  burned  on  the  altars  which  were 
decorated  as  for  a  holy  day.  Not  a  woman  was  seen  on  the 
streets  nor  a  face  at  the  windows.  Drunken  men  lay  on  the 
pavements  lapping  up  the  intoxicants  that  flowed  in  the  gut- 


342    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ter,  while  the  more  sober  were  wildly  running  about  among 
the  big  mansions,  stealing  everything  they  could  carry  away. 
As  the  hungry  soldiers  threw  themselves  upon  the  city,  they 
beat  off  the  native  looters,  and  Moscow  became  the  undisputed 
spoil  of  the  alien  invader. 

While  the  French  sentries,  patrolling  the  wall  of  the  Krem- 
lin that  starry  night,  looked  out  over  the  ghostly  city  -and 
watched  a  comet  which  glared  like  a  portent  in  the  sky,  they 
saw  fire  after  fire  flaming  up  above  the  roofs  in  many  sec- 
tions of  the  town.  A  foe  more  terrible  than  the  Cossack  was 
rising  to  challenge  the  invaders,  who  were  roused  from  their 
sleep  to  beat  him  back  and  save  from  destruction  the  only 
prize  they  had  won  since  crossing  the  Niemen. 

When  Napoleon  entered  the  gate  the  next  morning  and 
went  to  the  Kremlin,  his  captive  city  had  been  snatched  from 
him  by  the  banded  demons  of  fire  and  liquor,  hunger  and 
plunder.  The  beautiful  domes  and  towers  he  had  admired 
from  the  hill  were  wrapped  one  after  another  in  the  wither- 
ing embrace,  the  church  roofs  of  sheet  iron  and  lead  falling 
with  loud  crashes.  Palaces  were  swept  away  in  a  scorching 
breath,  the  sculptures  that  adorned  their  facades  crashing 
amid  the  ruins.  The  pitiless  flames  would  not  spare  the  hos- 
pitals, where  thousands,  unable  to  drag  themselves  into  the 
streets,  perished  in  their  wards.  Above  the  roaring  surges 
of  fire,  there  rang  out  the  groans  of  the  dying,  the  shrieks  of 
the  plundered,  the  crack  of  the  soldiers'  musketry,  the  howl- 
ing of  the  dogs  chained  to  the  gates  of  the  houses. 

On  the  third  day.  Napoleon's  officers  repeatedly  came  to 
warn  him  that  the  fire  was  roaring  at  the  Kremlin  gates  and  to 
beg  him  to  retreat  before  it.  But  not  until  it  was  difficult  for 
him  to  breathe  and  Berthier  had  come  to  report  that  he  had 
been  almost  swept  from  the  battlements  in  a  red  whirlwind, 
did  the  Emperor  consent  to  take  flight. 

The  hill  of  the  Kremlin  rose  like  an  island  in  a  tossing  sea 
of  fire,  and  Napoleon  had  great  difficulty  in  finding  an  avenue 
of  escape.  In  street  after  street  he  was  turned  back  by  a 
hail  of  flying  embers,  and  the  hoofs  of  the  horses  were 
burned  by  the  blistering  paving  stones.     With  a  cloak  over 


"Bad  News  from   France,"   by  Verestchagin 
(By    permission    of   the    Berlin    Photographic    Company.) 


THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD       343 

his  face  to  protect  his  eyes  and  mouth  from  the  stifling  breath 
of  the  flames,  he  was  wandering  bewildered  in  the  blinding 
atmosphere,  when  some  soldiers,  recognising  the  imperial 
party,  escorted  it  to  the  Petrofsky  palace,  the  suburban  villa 
of  the  Czars.  Even  there,  at  a  distance  of  two  miles,  the  Em- 
peror could  read  in  the  light  of  the  blazing  city. 

As  he  looked  down  upon  the  inferno  he  exclaimed,  ' '  What  a 
people !  They  are  the  Scythians,  indeed  ! ' '  Naturally  he  as- 
sumed that  the  Russians  had  fired  their  capital  and  doomed  it 
to  ashes  rather  than  let  it  be  his  prey.  Whether  ^Moscow 
really  was  immolated  on  the  pyre  of  patriotism,  the  world 
never  will  surely  know.  When  it  was  seen  that  its  destruc- 
tion had  driven  out  the  invaders  and  saved  the  empire,  the 
harebrained  governor  who  at  first  had  blamed  the  French  for 
burning  it,  noisily  avowed  that  he  himself  had  ordered  it 
burnt.  And  other  Russians,  flattered  by  the  thought  of  such 
an  heroic  sacrifice,  adopted  his  story. 

Yet  it  is  possible  that  Moscow  was  not  destroyed  by 
official  design  any  more  than  it  was  abandoned  by  official  de- 
sign. For  the  ]\Ioscow  that  looked  so  fair  when  Napoleon  saw 
it  from  Sparrow  Hill  was  only  a  painted  show  and  but  a  huge 
tinder  box.  It  was  easy  and  natural  enough  for  its  wooden 
houses  to  take  fire  when  left  to  the  mercy  of  frenzied  looters, 
prowling  over  them  with  torches  in  hand,  and  the  equinoxial 
winds  were  present  to  complete  the  havoc. 

The  hurricane  of  fire  swept  the  town  for  two  days  more 
until  a  rain  quenched  the  flames.  When  Napoleon  returned 
to  the  Kremlin,  which  had  suffered  no  great  damage,  the  city 
was  a  sorry  sight.  The  big  warehouses,  the  shops  and  bazars, 
the  grand  palaces  of  the  nobility  were  gone.  No  less  than 
6500  of  the  9000  buildings  had  been  destroyed,  and  most  of 
Moscow  was  but  a  heap  of  rubbish. 

Napoleon  was  marooned  on  an  ash  pile  more  than  2000 
miles  from  Paris.  His  marauding  soldiers  found  an  over- 
abundance of  wines  and  brandies.  They  arrayed  them- 
selves in  costly  furs  and  rare  eastern  shawls  and  decked 
out  the  women  in  their  "love  escort"  with  rich  gowns 
and  blazing  jewels.     Neither  the  altars  nor  the  graves  were 


344  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

spared  bj^  the  pillagers.  But  they  quickly  exhausted  the 
little  food  that  the  fleeing  residents  had  left  behind,  and 
bread  became  more  precious  than  the  precious  metals. 

Meanwhile,  benumbed  by  the  terrible  blow  that  had  fallen 
upon  him,  Napoleon  sat  day  after  day  in  the  gloom  of  the 
oriental  palace  at  the  Kremlin.  Bad  news  came  to  him  from 
Spain,  where  his  brother,  Joseph,  was  being  driven  from  his 
capital.  Grave  warnings  were  sounded  of  an  uneasy  spirit  in 
Prussia  and  Austria.  Sometimes  as  he  wrestled  alone  with 
his  black  problem,  hours  passed  without  a  word  from  the  Em- 
peror's  lips. 

Like  a  dog  mortally  injured,  as  Count  Tolstoi  says,  the 
Grand  Army  sat  down  amid  the  ruins  of  Moscow  to  lick  its 
w^ounds.  Daily  the  sun  blazed  redder  in  the  dull  autumnal 
sky.  September  waned.  The  nights  lengthened  and  the  long 
Russian  winter  drew  on.  Five  precious  summer  weeks  had 
passed  when  the  Russian  army,  resuming  active  operations, 
aroused  Napoleon  and  compelled  him  to  face  the  inevitable. 
He  must  retreat  from  that  desert  of  cinders,  before  the  long 
road  home  was  barricaded  with  Russian  bayonets  or  buried 
beneath  Russian  snows. 

October  was  far  advanced  when  he  turned  back  upon  hig 
trail  of  disaster.  If  a  Russian  summer  had  slain  half  his 
army  in  the  advance,  how  many  could  survive  a  retreat  in  a 
Russian  winter? 

As  if  to  fire  a  parting  shot  at  the  Czar,  the  retreating  Em- 
peror ordered  his  rear  guard  to  mine  and  blow  up  the  Krem- 
lin. The  earth  shivered  from  the  mighty  explosion  and  much 
damage  was  wrought,  but  that  strange  city  within  a  city  sur- 
vived the  shock  and  stands  unto  this  day  to  tell  the  story  of 
how  its  walls  baffled  fire  and  sword  in  1812.  Those  walls 
wind  for  more  than  a  mile  about  the  hill  that  rises  from  the 
banks  of  the  Moskva  in  the  midst  of  a  city  with  a  present 
population  of  a  million  and  a  quarter.  For  the  Kremlin  is  as 
much  in  the  centre  of  Moscow  as  Westminster  is  in  London, 
the  Palais  Royal  in  Paris,  the  Quirinal  in  Rome,  the  Schloss  in 
Berlin,  the  White  House  in  Washington,  the  City  Hall  in  New 
York  or  the  Common  in  Boston. 


THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD       345 

Not  that  the  most  melancholy  of  Napoleon 's  abodes  this  side 
of  St.  Helena  really  is  to  be  compared  with  any  of  those  places. 
The  Kremlin  is  peculiar  to  itself.  At  once  a  fortress  and  a 
shrine,  it  is  rather  the  JMuscovite  Alhambra,  where  in  other 
times  a  numerous  court  dwelt  and  frolicked  and  worshipped. 
It  is  the  village  which  expanded  into  an  empire.  It  is  the 
natal  den  of  the  Russian  bear,  whence  he  stole  forth  to  plant 
his  paw  upon  a  full  seventh  of  the  earth's  surface. 

Behind  those  walls,  the  dukes  of  Moscow  shielded  themselves 
from  the  arrows  of  the  Golden  Horde ;  there  Ivan  the  Terrible 
held  his  savage  court;  there  a  sixteen-year-old  boy  founded 
the  dynasty  of  the  Romanoffs;  there  was  born  the  epileptic, 
hairless  Peter  the  Great, 

In  his  envy  of  his  bewhiskered  subjects,  Peter  laid  a  fine 
of  100  roubles  on  every  beard  passing  through  the  Redeemer 
Gate  and  cruelly  filled  the  Kremlin  with  unimaginable  hor- 
rors. When  at  last  he  grew  weary  of  cutting  perverse  heads 
off  stubborn  necks,  he  abandoned  Moscow  entirely  to  set  up  his 
throne  and  erect  a  new  capital  on  the  wild  and  dreary  marshes 
of  the  Neva. 

The  Kremlin  ceased  thenceforth  to  be  the  seat  of  imperial 
power,  although  it  still  pretended  to  be  a  military  strong- 
hold when  Napoleon  ordered  its  destruction.  Its  old  walls, 
even  though  they  are  from  thirty  to  seventy  feet  high  and 
from  fourteen  to  twenty  feet  thick,  are  now  only  a  harmless 
relic  of  a  bygone  age  of  warfare,  and  water  no  longer  flows  in 
the  moat,  where  in  the  green  shade  the  children  play  and 
lovers  sigh. 

Notwithstanding  the  Czars  have  reigned  at  Petrograd  for 
more  than  200  years,  each  in  turn  has  faithfully  come 
back  to  be  anointed  and  crowned  at  the  ancient  altar  of  the 
cathedral  in  the  Kremlin,  Thither  Nicholas  II  came  a  pilgrim 
in  the  midsummer  of  1914,  to  invoke  the  favour  of  Heaven 
for  Russian  arms  in  the  War  of  the  Nations. 

The  city  that  Peter  built  on  the  Neva  is  only  a  thing  of 
brick  and  stone  and  mortar,  IMoscow  remains  to  the  Rus- 
sians the  holy  city  and  the  Kremlin  hill  is  its  ]\It.  Moriah,  the 
sanctuary  of  the  holy  of  holies. 


346     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

While  the  Kremlin  celebrates  the  glories  of  the  Empire  of 
the  Czars,  it  commemorates  as  well  the  defeat  of  Napoleon, 
whose  empire,  like  a  great  ship  on  a  rock,  was  beaten  to  pieces 
against  its  walls.  It  is  indeed  a  colossal  monument  of  a  most 
colossal  failure.  At  its  very  portal  the  visitor  is  confronted 
with  a  reminder  of  the  extraordinary  disaster  of  1812.  It  is 
the  grey  stone  gate  of  St.  Nicholas,  where  Poles  and  Tartars 
and  ^Muscovites  have  fought  and  bled  these  hundreds  of  years. 

Above  the  gate  rises  a  bell  tower,  with  its  miraculous  image 
or  ikon  of  St.  Nicholas.  Although  the  French  laid  a  mine 
under  the  gate  and  blew  its  tower  to  fragments,  as  a  memorial 
tablet  records,  the  ikon  "by  the  wonderful  power  of  God" 
was  unharmed  and  even  the  pane  of  glass  over  it  and  the  lan- 
tern and  candle  belonging  to  it  were  not  broken.  Wherefore, 
the  tablet  triumphantly  inquires,  "Who  is  greater  than  God, 
our  God,  the  marvellous  God  who  doest  miracles  by  his 
saints?" 

Another  of  the  sixteen  gates  that  pierce  the  Kremlin  wall 
is  even  more  venerated  and  with  a  still  more  miraculous  ikon, 
which  centuries  ago  confounded  and  dispersed  the  besieging 
Tartars.  Through  this  gate  the  Czars  all  go  to  their  corona- 
tions. No  one,  not  even  the  most  hurrying  drosky  driver, 
passes  in  or  out  of  it  with  covered  head.  And  anybody  in 
the  genuflecting  throng  that  daily  pours  through  it  could  tell 
the  stranger  that  Napoleon  paid  dear  for  refusing  to  imcover 
at  that  Gate  of  the  Kedeemer! 

Entering  the  gate,  the  unwarned  stranger  is  startled  by  a 
mob  of  towers  and  domes  and  a  riot  of  colour  and  architec- 
ture. Possibly  he  may  be  surprised  to  see  before  him  not  one 
great  palace  or  castle,  but  a  city  of  palaces  and  gardens,  of 
churches,  shrines,  and  convents,  of  museums,  courts  and  bar- 
racks, of  streets  and  open  squares. 

For  the  Kremlin  really  is  a  city  in  itself.  It  has  no  less 
than  ten  churches  and  as  many  as  three  dozen  big  bells,  in- 
cluding the  Napoleon  bell,  so  called  because  it  was  cast  from 
metal  dug  out  of  the  fire  ruins. 

Each  of  the  Kremlin  churches  has  its  own  bitter  memory 
of  the  Napoleonic  invasion,  but  the  bitterest  of  all  lurks  in 


THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD       347 

the  dusk  of  the  special  church  of  the  Czars.  There  on  the 
very  altar  before  which  the  Romanoffs  kneel  to  receive  the  oil 
of  consecration,  the  alien  soldiers  squatted  and  gambled  with 
cards,  while  they  stabled  their  horses  in  its  nave  and  chapels, 
even  as  they  had  desecrated  the  great  mosque  of  el  Ahzar  at 
Cairo.  The  church,  however,  has  its  triumph  to  offset  its 
shame,  for  its  present  chandeliers  were  cast  from  900  pounds 
of  stolen  silver  that  the  Cossacks  recaptured  from  the  retreat- 
ing Grand  Army. 

On  everything  that  glistened  in  the  churches  of  the  Krem- 
lin the  soldiers  laid  their  pillaging  hands.  Not  only  were 
the  gold  and  silver  ikons  and  vessels  dumped  into  the  melting 
pot,  but  even  the  gold  leaf  was  stripped  from  the  images  and 
decorations. 

The  most  conspicuous  of  the  towers,  that  of  Ivan  or  John, 
recalls  the  day  when  the  Emperor  stood  before  it  personally 
superintending  the  removal  of  its  enormous  cross.  And  for 
what  purpose?  To  send  it  to  Paris  and  place  it  above  the 
dome  of  the  Hotel  des  Invalides.  But  the  immense  thing 
tumbled  and  crashed,  nearly  killing  its  impious  assailants. 
Only  by  that  lucky  mischance  was  Napoleon  spared  the  igno- 
miny of  finding  his  grave  beneath  a  stolen  cross. 

The  palace  of  Napoleon,  or  that  part  of  it  which  he  occupied, 
in  the  Kremlin,  was  torn  down  long  ago.  In  place  of  it,  the 
Czars  have  the  most  palatial  of  all  the  palaces  in  Europe,  with 
great  halls  of  glistening  marble  and  gleaming  gold,  hung  in 
red  and  blue,  with  noble  columns  of  rarest  stones  and  thou- 
sands upon  thousands  of  electric  lights  glowing  in  its  chande- 
liers. 

The  faithful  in  their  pilgrimage  to  the  Kremlin  meet  with 
many  mementoes  of  its  invasion  to  tempt  them  away  from 
the  Christian  principle  of  forgiveness.  The  Russian,  how- 
ever, seems  to  be  innocent  of  any  petty  spite  toward  Na- 
poleon's memory.  Try  to  imagine  the  Americans  setting  up 
in  their  capital  a  statue  of  the  British  general  who  burned 
Washington  in  1814!  Yet  almost  the  first  object  that  rises  to 
the  view  of  the  visitor  to  the  treasury  or  the  museum  of  the 
Kremlin  is  a  great  marble  statue   of  the   Emperor  of  the 


348  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

French,  His  gift  of  a  service  of  Sevres,  which  he  made  to  the 
Czar  in  the  days  of  their  fraternizing,  is  also  cherished  there 
among  the  precious  keepsakes  of  the  nation.  Apparently 
Alexander  did  not  send  his  presents  back  when  they  quar- 
relled ! 

Napoleon's  sleigh  is  there,  brought  in  by  the  Cossacks,  who 
captured  it,  and  even  his  bed,  which  was  picked  up  on  the 
banks  of  the  Beresina  after  his  flight  over  the  river,  stands 
beside  the  bed  of  Peter  the  Great  and  the  enormous  boots  of 
that  giant  monarch.  A  large  portrait  of  him  which  the  Cos- 
sacks brought  back  from  the  Waterloo  campaign  completes 
the  story  of  how  Russia  avenged  herself  by  chasing  the  in- 
vader clear  across  the  European  continent.  A  still  more  con- 
clusive exhibit  is  formed  by  a  row  of  879  cannon  captured 
from  the  retreating  army  of  twenty  nations,  and  which 
stretches  the  full  length  of  the  arsenal  wall  in  the  Kremlin. 

The  greatest  monument  of  all  the  memorials  of  Napoleon's 
repulse  from  Moscow,  however,  stands  just  outside  the  Krem- 
lin wall.  It  is  the  magnificent  Church  of  Our  Saviour,  which 
Alexander  intended  to  erect  on  Sparrow  Hill,  where  it  would 
have  mocked  the  memory  of  Napoleon's  fleeting  moment  of 
triumph  there.  After  an  immense  amount  of  money  had  been 
spent  in  a  vain  effort  to  find  a  firm  foundation  on  the  hill, 
the  plan  was  changed  and  the  church  was  set  up  in  front  of 
the  very  gate  through  which  the  invading  Emperor  passed  into 
the  Kremlin. 

There,  on  the  bank  of  the  Moskva,  rises  this  grandest  and 
costliest  of  all  the  war  monuments  in  the  world.  There,  by 
the  Kremlin  gate,  the  nation  sends  up  in  purest  white  marble 
its  prayer  of  thanksgiving,  its  Te  Deum,  while  within  its  walls 
there  rises  at  high  mass  a  burst  of  song  that  ravishes  the  soul. 
From  a  lofty  gallery,  the  visitor  looks  down  upon  the  lacy 
marble  of  the  snowy  altar,  with  its  priests  in  their  rich  vest- 
ments of  gold,  and  upon  a  multitude  of  worshippers,  some- 
times as  many  as  15,000  standing  on  a  floor  of  jasper. 

The  beautiful  baritone  of  the  priestly  chant  mounts  higher 
and  higher  until  it  seems  like  the  crescendo  of  a  great  pipe 
organ.     Then  a  famous  choir  marches  down  a  lane  made  by 


THE  TORCH  THAT  FIRED  THE  WORLD       349 

the  soldiers,  who  have  pushed  the  people  back,  and  takes  its 
stand  in  the  centre  of  the  church.  From  the  hundreds  of 
throats  of  those  well-drilled  choristers,  unaccompanied  by  any 
instruments,  the  choirmaster  draws  a  wonderful  variety  of 
tones,  high  and  low,  a  glorious  symphony  that  is  more  like  the 
music  of  a  great  orchestra  than  of  the  voices  of  young  peasants 
whose  parents  were  born  into  Russian  serfdom. 

This  church  is  the  most  imposing,  the  most  interesting,  the 
most  significant  of  all  the  souvenirs  of  Napoleon's  capture 
and  abandonment  of  Moscow.  There  is  something  thoroughly 
characteristic  of  Russia,  something  peculiar  to  the  Russian 
nature,  something  very  expressive  of  a  nation  whose  patriot- 
ism and  religion  are  one  and  the  same  thing  in  tins  religious 
edifice  built  to  celebrate  the  deliverance  of  Moscow  from  a 
military  invasion. 

Other  Christian  people  rear  temples  and  columns  and  arches 
in  imitation  of  the  classic  pagans.  They  are  either  monuments 
of  revenge  or  of  self  glorification.  Even  the  medals  that 
Alexander  I  struck  and  gave  all  his  soldiers  who  pursued  Na- 
poleon from  the  Moskva  to  the  Seine,  did  not  glorify  arms, 
but  God.  On  the  medals  the  eye  in  the  triangle  was  engraved 
as  a  symbol  of  God's  providence,  and  they  were  inscribed 
* '  Not  unto  us,  not  unto  us,  but  unto  Thy  name  ! ' ' 

It  was  in  that  spirit  of  gratefulness  to  the  Divine  Power 
that  Russia  chose  to  make  her  great  war  memorial  a  votive 
offering.  It  was  in  that  spirit  that  she  dedicated  to  "Christ, 
Our  Saviour,"  the  noble  church  whose  dome,  the  loftiest  and 
most  golden  of  the  domes  of  a  new  JMoscow  risen  from  the 
ashes,  would  be  the  first  to  draw  his  gaze  could  Napoleon  re- 
treat from  the  realms  of  shade  to  revisit  the  glimpses  of  the 
moon  and  walk  again  on  Sparrow  Hill. 


CHAPTER  XLI 
THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY 

1812-1813      AGE   43 

HAVING  seen  at  last  that  he  must  "abandon  that  pile 
of  rubbish,"  Napoleon  marched  his  army  out  of  the 
still  smoking  ruins  of  Moscow  on  an  October  morning 
in  1812  and  began  his  long  retreat  from  Russia. 

The  retreating  mass  had  hardly  crowded  past  the  gates 
of  the  city,  when  its  wagons  began  to  stall  and  its  sumptuous 
carriages  which  had  been  stolen  from  the  stables  of  the  no- 
bility began  to  break  down.  As  the  Emperor  overtook  it  and 
pushed  his  way  through,  it  was  already  a  disorganised  rabble. 
He  no  longer  commanded  a  Grand  Army,  but  was  swept  along 
helplessly  in  the  midst  of  the  strangest  horde  that  Europe 
had  seen  since  the  Goths  poured  out  of  the  German  forests. 

Cursing  and  shouting  in  a  babel  of  languages,  the  confused 
and  motley  procession  stretched  its  length  for  miles  and  miles 
as  it  wound  its  way  over  the  illimitable  Russian  steppes. 
If  the  men  under  arms  numbered  100,000,  and  no  one  knoW'S 
how  many  there  really  were,  they  were  followed  by  half  as 
many  more  noncombatants,  who  clung  to  the  legs  of  the  toil- 
ing army  and  held  it  back.  Some  of  these  were  prisoners, 
some  were  servants ;  many  were  mere  hangers  on.  Beside  the 
eantine  women  and  other  hardy  members  of  the  ''love  escort" 
who  had  survived  the  advance,  there  were  French  and  other 
foreign  women  residents  of  Moscow,  who  were  fleeing  from 
the  wrath  of  the  Muscovites. 

There  were  2000  army  wagons  and  570  cannons  to  be 
dragged  over  the  long  weary  road  ahead  and  all  manner  of 
other  vehicles  loaded  down  with  the  spoils  of  Moscow.  Some 
foolish  looters  had  piled  their  booty  on  wheelbarrows,  and 
were  starting  to  push  it  2000  miles  across  Europe. 

350 


THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY  351 

No  army  ever  was  so  heavily  encumbered  with  baggage. 
It  was  plunder  poor  at  the  outset.  Count  Tolstoi  has  likened 
it  to  a  monkey  whose  hand  is  caught  in  the  narrow  neck  of  a 
jar  of  nuts  but  who  refuses  to  open  his  fist  and  draw  it  out 
for  fear  of  dropping  his  loot. 

Weighted  down  with  gold  and  silver,  wdth  rich  stores  of  rare 
wines  and  liquors,  with  great  stocks  of  beautiful  gowns  and 
gold  laced  coats,  the  mob  began  a  march  of  many  hundredsl 
of  miles  and  many  weeks  through  a  barren  wilderness  in  a 
Russian  winter — with  worn-out  boots  and  summer  uniforms 
and  food  enough  for  only  ten  days! 

Napoleon  had  hoped  to  throw  the  enemy  off  the  scent. 
When  Kutusof  overtook  him,  however,  he  was  only  five  days 
from  Moscow.  Thenceforth  he  had  to  back  out  of  Russia, 
with  his  pursuer  pressing  upon  him  at  every  step.  Night 
and  day  his  soldiers  were  forever  beset  by  Cossack  cavalry. 
They  had  to  fight  not  only  for  roads  and  bridges,  but  also  take 
turns  in  warding  off  the  swarming  pests  while  their  comrades 
slept  or  stopped  to  cook  a  meal. 

After  passing  by  the  field  of  Borodino,  on  which  40,000  of 
the  battle  slain  lay  unburied  where  they  had  fallen  seven  weeks 
before,  another  enemy  more  grim  than  any  foe  in  arms  closed 
in  upon  the  retreating  band.  Hunger  now  pitilessly  assailed 
and  swiftly  thinned  its  ranks.  There  was  hardly  a  grain  of 
wheat  within  twenty  miles  of  the  road  on  either  side.  For 
the  two  rival  armies  while  passing  through  the  country  in 
August  and  September  had  eaten  it  bare  and  burned  the 
villages.  The  poor  peasantry  had  received  an  impressive 
illustration  of  the  expressive  Russian  saying :  ' '  When  wolves 
fight,  the  sheep  lose  their  wool." 

In  the  presence  of  starvation,  the  gaudy  and  useless  spoils 
of  Moscow  were  cast  aside  in  disgust.  The  Russians,  as  they 
followed  along,  found  the  highway  strewn  with  discarded 
treasures  and  abandoned  wagons  and  cannons.  Comrades 
and  messmates  began  to  hide  from  one  another  their  flour, 
rice,  or  potatoes  as  something  too  precious  to  be  shared.  Un- 
fed horses  sank  in  their  traces,  only  to  be  seized  upon  as  food, 
while  a  black  cloud  of  vultures  hovered  in  the  rear  like  gulls 


352     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in  the  wake  of  a  ship  at  sea,  and  packs  of  howling  wolves 
also  took  up  the  chase. 

Nearly  half  the  army  was  lost  in  the  first  two  weeks  of  the 
retreat,  on  the  first  150  miles  of  the  march.  And  not  more 
than  a  fourth  of  them  had  fallen  before  the  human  foe  and 
met  a  soldier's  death.  All  that  havoc  was  wrought  before  the 
end  of  the  first  week  in  November,  when  the  weather  was  so 
unseasonably  mild  that  it  was  remarked  as  a  gift  from  fortune 
to  her  long-time  favourite.  Napoleon's  bulletin  likened  it 
to  "the  sun  and  the  beautiful  days  of  a  trip  to  Fontaine- 
bleau."  There  was  not  even  a  serious  frost  the  first  week, 
and  the  temperature  did  not  fall  below  the  freezing  point 
until  the  army  was  twelve  days  out.  At  the  end  of  sixteen 
days  the  Emperor  still  described  the  weather  as  "perfect." 
Yet  his  armed  force  had  dwindled  to  55,000  men ! 

Napoleon  was  not  overwhelmed  by  the  elements  in  his 
Russian  campaign.  Neither  the  fires  of  Moscow  nor  the  snows 
of  the  steppes  undid  him.  On  the  contrary,  before  ever  he 
looked  upon  Moscow  and  as  he  was  advancing  in  summer, 
half  his  army  had  melted  away,  while  in  a  fortnight  of  a 
genial  autumn  he  lost  nearly  half  his  retreating  army.  The 
weather  was  not  to  blame  for  the  stupendous  disaster  of  1812. 
The  hosts  of  the  twenty  nations  perished  for  the  simple,  un- 
dramatic  reason  that  they  did  not  have  enough  to  eat.  Had 
they  been  housed  at  home  in  warm  barracks  they  could  not 
have  lived  on  the  food  and  drink  they  found  in  Russia.  By 
the  end  of  ten  days  after  the  retreat  began  there  was  neither 
bread  nor  beef  for  the  men. 

Truly  an  army  moves  on  its  belly.  On  coming  to  Russia 
Napoleon  had  violated  one  of  his  own  axioms,  "Never  make 
war  on  a  desert."  When,  in  a  mad  conceit,  he  marched  more 
than  600,000  men  into  a  poverty-stricken  wilderness,  where 
they  could  not  live  off  the  countrj^  and  where  the  roads  were 
so  poor  that  the  supply  trains  were  stalled,  he  sealed  their 
doom  and  his  own.  Neither  General  Januarj^  nor  General 
February  nor  yet  General  Kutusof  was  needed  to  fix  his  fate. 
For  there  was  only  a  broken  fragment  of  the  army  left  when 


THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY  353 

the  first  snowflake  fell  in  the  third  week  of  the  retreat.  Nor 
did  Napoleon  lose  a  battle  on  Russian  soil. 

As  the  winter  drew  on,  another  disaster  befell  the  remnant 
of  the  army  from  still  another  prosaic  cause.  In  the  confident 
summer  days  when  supplies  were  laid  in,  thought  had  not 
been  taken  of  the  possibility  of  a  winter  campaign,  and  no 
calks  were  provided  for  the  horses'  shoes.  The  horses  of 
the  cavalry,  the  hospital  wagons,  the  supply  trains  and  the 
guns  not  being  sharp-shod,  slipped  on  the  ice,  and  when  they 
fell,  there  was  small  chance  of  their  finding  strength  to  get  up 
again.  For  want  of  a  little  sharp-pointed  piece  of  iron,  there- 
fore, the  army  suffered  worse  than  from  some  far  more 
picturesque  causes. 

With  the  coming  of  the  snow,  the  sleet  and  the  icy  blasts 
of  winter,  the  men  not  only  had  to  struggle  for  food,  but 
for  shelter  as  well.  "Even  the  ravens  froze."  To  be  sure, 
the  temperature  never  approached  the  low  levels  to  which 
American  soldiers  have  been  exposed  in  some  Indian  cam- 
paigns. But  many  of  Napoleon's  men  were  from  the  sunny 
lands  of  the  Mediterranean,  and  all  were  so  ill  prepared  and 
ill  clothed  for  the  unaccustomed  severity  of  a  more  rigorous 
climate  that  they  were  crazed  by  the  biting  cold. 

The  rearguard  marched  over  the  fallen  in  the  road,  but 
never  failed  to  stop  long  enough  to  strip  the  bodies  of  any 
warm  garments  they  chanced  to  wear.  A  survivor  tells  of 
his  surprise  when  one  whom  he  supposed  to  be  dead  pleaded 
to  be  left  in  possession  of  a  fur  coat,  and  he  reports  his  own 
grim  reply,  "All  right,  I  can  wait." 

Humanity  survived  in  some  breasts.  "When  a  \avandiere 
was  delivered  of  a  child  in  the  snow,  the  colonel  of  her  regi- 
ment and  the  surgeon  did  everything  possible  for  her  com- 
fort. With  her  infant  wrapped  in  sheepskins  in  her  arms,  she 
was  placed  on  the  colonel's  horse  when  the  march  was  resumed 
the  next  morning.  Nevertheless,  as  the  regiment  halted  a  few 
days  later,  and  the  mother  prepared  to  nurse  her  baby,  she 
cried  out  in  anguish  on  discovering  that  the  child  was  frozen. 
Her  husband,  the  barber  of  the  regiment,  sadly  took  the  poor, 


354    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

lifeless  little  thing  from  the  breast  of  the  weeping  vivandiere, 
kissed  it  and  laid  it  in  its  tomb  of  snow. 

Another  vivandiere,  who  had  given  two  children  to  the 
snow,  is  portrayed  sitting  by  the  road  as  the  troops  stumble 
by,  holding  in  her  lap  the  head  of  her  dying  husband  while  her 
one  remaining  child  is  bending  over  them,  her  tears  freezing 
as  they  fall  on  the  father's  face.  The  dog  of  a  regiment,  who 
had  followed  it  from  Spain  to  Vienna  and  to  Moscow,  unable 
longer  because  of  frozen  feet,  to  keep  step  with  the  soldiers 
was  carried  on  the  shoulders  of  one  of  them  until  he  died  of 
the  cold.  The  humble  loyalty  of  some  Germans  to  their  boy 
prince  was  not  lost.  To  shield  the  twenty -year-old  princeling 
from  a  bitter  night  while  he  slept  in  his  cloak,  they  stood 
around  him  in  a  solid  wall,  where  three-fourths  of  them  froze 
and  died  that  he  might  live. 

When  the  wretched  remnant  of  the  army  came  again  in 
sight  of  the  towers  of  the  ruined  city  of  Smolensk,  the  Em- 
peror himself  was  afoot,  plodding  through  the  snow  with  an 
iron-pointed  staff.  In  the  three  weeks  since  he  left  Moscow, 
200  guns  had  been  abandoned  along  the  lane  of  death.  "Worse 
still,  thousands  of  the  weakened  men  had  found  their  muskets 
too  heavy  to  be  carried  and  had  thrown  them  away.  The 
force  was  now  reduced  to  less  than  50,000  soldiers  in  widely 
separated  columns,  and  many  of  these  were  without  weapons. 
In  the  twelve  weeks  that  had  passed  since  Napoleon  first 
stood  before  the  walls  of  Smolensk,  in  that  period  of  less  than 
three  months,  he  had  lost  135,000  men. 

As  he  paused  there  on  the  banks  of  the  Dneiper,  the  Rus- 
sians were  closing  in  upon  him  from  all  directions  and  threat- 
ening every  avenue  of  escape.  He  dared  not  wait  long  enough 
to  reunite  and  reorganise  his  slender,  scattered  forces,  and  he 
fled  for  safety  with  only  15,000  men,  leaving  his  sick  behind 
him. 

When  he  came  to  Krasnoi,  almost  the  last  town  in  White 
Russia,  he  halted  for  the  belated  divisions  of  Davout,  Eugene, 
and  Ney,  before  plunging  into  the  Lithuanian  wilds.  With 
his  15,000  half-starved  veterans,  he  turned  in  desperation 
upon  his  80,000  pursuers  and  cowed  them  with  the  dread  of 


THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY  355 

his  name.  Marshal  Davout  succeeded  in  joining  him,  and 
Prince  Eugene  got  around  the  enemy  and  effected  a  junction 
with  the  Emperor,  but  with  the  loss  of  nearly  half  of  his 
6000  men  in  twenty-four  hours. 

Davout  and  Eugene  having  caught  up  with  him  at  Krasnoi, 
Napoleon  pressed  on  without  waiting  for  Ney.  As  he  sped 
onward,  he  had  small  hope  of  ever  again  seeing  "the  bravest 
of  the  brave"  among  his  marshals.  "I  have,"  he  sighed, 
"more  than  80,000,000  francs  in  the  cellars  of  the  Tuileries, 
and  I  would  gladly  give  them  all  for  the  ransom  of  IMarshal 
Ney." 

The  marshal  ransomed  himself  with  his  courage.  But  when, 
at  last,  he  overtook  the  Emperor,  only  900  haggard  faces 
appeared  in  the  wasted  ranks  of  the  column  of  6000  warriors 
who  had  left  Smolensk  four  days  before.  Only  those  900 
were  left  of  the  corps  of  39,000  men  with  which  Ney  had  en- 
tered upon  the  Russian  campaign.  In  a  few  days  200  more 
would  rest  in  the  snows. 

As  Napoleon  in  his  flight  with  the  mockery  of  his  Grand 
Army  approached  the  Beresina  river,  the  sun,  which  no  longer 
shone  for  him  as  at  Austerlitz,  thawed  the  marshes  and  broke 
up  the  ice  in  the  stream.  "With  only  30,000  men,  he  must 
bridge  and  cross  a  river,  while  65,000  Russians  pressed  be- 
hind him,  30,000  bore  down  upon  him  from  the  north  and 
34,000  threatened  him  from  the  south.  Yet  he  had  only  to 
turn  and  growl  at  them  to  throw  them  back  in  such  panic  as 
to  spread  demoralisation  throughout  all  their  armies  and  ren- 
der comparatively  harmless  a  force  more  than  four  times 
greater  than  his  own. 

Unluckily  he  had  burned  his  pontoon  train  as  a  useless  in- 
cumbrance only  to  find  that  the  Russians  had  destroyed  the 
bridge  by  which  he  intended  to  pass  over  the  Beresina.  "Is 
it  written  there,"  he  bitterly  exclaimed  as  he  looked  up  to  the 
heavens,  ' '  that  we  shall  do  nothing  but  make  mistakes  ? ' ' 

For  the  lack  of  better  material,  he  tore  down  houses  and 
built  his  bridges  of  such  sticks  as  he  could  pick  up.  In  the 
eagerness  of  his  soldiers  to  put  the  river  between  them  and  the 
Russians,  they  fought  among  themselves  in  the  desire  of  all 


356  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

to  take  a  hand  in  the  work  of  bridging  it.  They  leaped  into 
the  icy  waters  up  to  their  shoulders  and  laboured  there  until 
two  bridges  spanned  the  little  stream  no  wider  than  a  narrow 
city  street.  But  not  more  than  five  in  100  of  those  devoted 
bridge  builders  survived  the  exposure  and  returned  to  their 
homes. 

Napoleon  and  the  Old  Guard  at  once  crossed  to  the  home- 
ward bank.  There,  however,  they  had  to  make  an  all-day 
fight  to  beat  off  a  Russian  army  which  had  come  to  dispute 
their  passage.  The  weather  was  growing  colder  and  guards- 
men went  about  the  camp  calling  for  dry  firewood  to  keep  the 
shivering  monarch  warm  in  his  hovel  on  the  river  bank. 
Though  themselves  chilled  to  the  marrow,  half  dead  grenadiers 
took  fagots  from  their  own  scanty  piles  and  said,  ''Give  these 
to  the  Emperor." 

On  the  other  shore,  the  army  and  its  hangers  on,  deprived 
of  Napoleon's  care,  became  an  unmanageable  mob.  Not  that 
they  stampeded  in  their  haste  to  escape  over  the  river.  On 
the  contrary,  the  bridges  remained  idle  all  night  long,  while 
frostbitten  men  and  women  persisted  in  staying  near  the 
bridge  heads  in  the  warmth  of  the  burning  wagons  that  had 
been  devoted  to  destruction.  Thousands  of  others,  stupefied 
by  hunger  and  benumbed  by  cold,  sank  into  a  sluggish  indif- 
ference to  their  fate,  from  which  they  could  not  be  awakened 
in  the  morning  until  they  saw  the  spears  of  the  Cossacks 
bearing  down  upon  them  and  the  shells  of  the  Russian  artil- 
lery raining  from  the  heights  behind  them. 

Then  they  rose  in  a  wild  panic  and  madly  fought  with  one 
another  at  the  entrance  to  the  bridges,  which  were  quickly 
choked  with  horses,  wagons,  and  guns,  men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren. Many  were  struck  down  in  the  heedless  rush  and  many 
others  were  pushed  into  the  river.  One  of  the  bridges  at  last 
sank  beneath  its  burden  and  filled  the  stream  with  a  scream- 
ing, struggling,  drowning  mass.  Many  were  still  on  the  re- 
maining bridge  when  the  Russians  advanced  to  seize  it  and 
the  French  fired  it,  giving  their  own  people  to  the  flames  or 
the  waters  to  save  themselves  from  pursuit.  Other  thousands 
were  still  on  the  shore,  ready  for  the  Cossack  knife. 


THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY  357 

Perhaps  only  12,000  or  13,000  had  crossed  the  Beresina,  no 
more  in  number  than  they  who  were  found  asleep  on  the  bank 
when  the  Russian  spring  came  and  lifted  their  mantle  of  snow. 
But  flood  and  flame  never  told  how  many  thousands  of  lives 
they  took  between  them. 

"Food!"  "Food!"  "Food!"  That  was  the  cry  Napo- 
leon sent  on  ahead,  as  he  marched  his  tatterdemalions  toward 
Vilna,  where,  five  months  before,  the  earth  had  trembled  be- 
neath the  tread  of  his  hundreds  of  thousands  of  troops.  He 
himself  was  not  going  to  Vilna,  but  was  about  to  shake  off 
his  nightmare  army.  A  month  had  passed  since  a  courier, 
riding  at  a  furious  pace,  came  to  him  on  the  march  to  Smo- 
lensk and  brought  the  report  of  a  movement  to  seize  the  gov- 
ernment at  Paris.  A  demented  man,  who  had  broken  away 
from  his  keepers,  had  been  able  to  communicate  to  others  his 
delusion  that  the  Emperor  was  dead,  place  himself  in  com- 
mand of  600  of  the  Guard  and  cast  into  prison  Savary,  the 
minister  of  police,  along  with  the  prefect  of  police.  If  a  crazy 
man,  armed  with  a  crazy  rumour,  could  do  that,  Napoleon 
naturally  wondered  what  would  become  of  his  throne  if  he 
were  not  seated  upon  it,  when  Paris  should  hear  that  the 
Grand  Army  was  dead. 

He  rode  into  the  little  village  of  Smorgoni,  therefore,  with 
a  determination  to  free  himself  from  the  wreckage  and  race 
to  his  capital  ahead  of  the  news  of  his  disaster.  Closeting 
himself  at  Smorgoni,  he  sat  down  and  wrote  the  last  bulletin 
of  the  campaign,  blaming  everything  on  the  Russian  winter 
and  on  "men  whom  nature  had  not  fashioned  stoutly  enough 
to  be  above  all  the  chances  of  fate  and  fortune."  As  if  to 
draw  a  contrast  between  himself  and  the  Half  INIillion  who 
had  fallen,  he  added,  "the  health  of  His  Majesty  has  never 
been  better."  That  closing  line,  however,  obviously  had  the 
less  sinister  motive  of  assuring  the  restless  revolutionists  of 
France  that  the  eagle  Avas  not  winged. 

Finally  having  committed  to  King  Murat  the  horrid  skele- 
ton of  the  greatest  military  body  that  ever  had  marched  to 
war  in  modern  times,  Napoleon  stole  away  by  night  in  an  open 
sleigh  with  Duroc  and  Caulaineourt.  Roustan  and  a  Polish 


358  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

guide.  It  was  not  glorious,  but  it  was  the  only  thing  to  do. 
Some  one  else  could  lead  the  staggering  Ten  Thousand,  but  he 
alone,  once  he  was  in  Paris,  could  stamp  his  foot  and  raise  up 
new  legions. 

Other  detachments  came  and  joined  the  little  column  from 
Moscow,  but  only  to  swell  its  list  of  deaths  to  20,000  in  the 
short  distance  between  Smorgoni  and  Vilna.  The  feasting 
in  the  latter  city  proved  to  be  as  fatal  as  the  fasting  had  been 
on  the  march  from  ]\Ioscow. 

As  the  flight  to  Kovno  began  there  were  only  9000  under 
arms.  "When  Ney,  bringing  up  the  rear,  rode  into  that  town 
on  the  Niemen,  the  gateway  which  in  June  had  opened  so  in- 
vitingly to  the  grave,  he  found  2000  soldiers  lying  drunk  in 
the  streets.  Others,  hardly  less  delirious  from  privation, 
crouched  about  the  fires  and  doggedly  refused  to  take  the  few 
steps  remaining  to  complete  their  long  retreat  out  of  Russia. 

The  Cossacks  soon  swooping  down  upon  the  place,  sent 
panic  into  the  feeble  ranks  of  the  little  rear  guard.  Ney, 
however,  seized  a  musket  and  laying  low  the  boldest,  fought  on 
until  he  had  only  thirty  men  in  his  redoubt,  but  he  had  re- 
pelled his  assailants.  The  next  morning  at  dawn,  he  crossed 
the  Niemen,  the  last  to  quit  Eussian  soil. 

The  pursuing  Cossacks  galloped  bej'ond  their  national 
boundary,  and  the  miserable  fragment  of  the  Grand  Army 
broke  into  atoms  as  it  dispersed  in  the  sheltering  woods  of 
East  Prussia.  A  spectral  band  of  400  of  the  Old  Guard 
stalked  into  Konigsberg  behind  Murat,  who,  remembering 
that  he  as  well  as  Napoleon  had  a  throne  to  save,  dropped  the 
command  and  hastened  away  to  Naples.  The  ever  faithful 
Prince  Eugene  then  picked  up  such  pieces  as  he  could,  and 
welding  them  together  in  the  warmth  of  his  own  loyalty  to 
the  Empire,  backed  across  Germany  until  he  stood  on  the 
shore  of  the  Elbe. 

The  Russian  campaign  was  at  an  end.  Again  the  Czar 
was  dancing  at  Vilna. 

The  cost  of  the  expedition  in  human  life  was  so  enormous 
that  there  is  no  agreement  as  to  the  total.  By  one  calcula- 
tion, 630,000  men  entered  Russia  and  60,000  returned.     For 


THE  GREAT  TRAGEDY  359 

although  only  6000  escaped  over  the  Niemen  with  their  arms, 
there  were  small  supporting  columns  in  Poland  which  were 
not  engaged  in  the  deadly  advance  and  retreat,  and  which 
suffered  much  less.  The  Russians  boasted  that  they  took 
200,000  prisoners,  but  how  many  of  these  died  in  captivity  or 
remained  after  the  war  to  disappear  into  the  Russian  nation 
no  one  knows. 

Another  computation  gives  125,000  as  the  number  slain  in 
battle,  132,000  as  dying  of  privation,  and  leaves  to  doubt  the 
fate  of  the  captured,  while  10,000  is  given  as  the  total  of  the 
French  who  escaped  with  their  lives.  Napoleon  himself  ad- 
mitted a  loss  of  300,000  men.  Of  the  more  than  1200 
guns  Napoleon  hurled  into  the  frightful  abyss,  at  least 
a  full  thousand  were  lost,  together  with  countless  standards 
and  eagles.  The  crew  went  down  but  the  officers  were  saved, 
not  a  marshal,  not  a  man  above  the  rank  of  general  of  division 
having  been  sacrificed. 

The  aggregate  of  the  Russian  losses  is  unknown.  But  the 
armies  of  the  Czar  suffered  only  less  than  Napoleon's.  They 
lost  50,000  between  ]\Ioscow  and  Krasnoi,  and  the  estimated 
total  for  the  entire  campaign  of  six  months  runs  as  high  as 
150,000. 

Fleeing  over  the  snow  night  and  day  from  the  scene  of  the 
tragedy,  the  Emperor  surprised  his  ambassador  at  Warsaw  by 
his  sudden  and  unheralded  appearance  in  the  Polish  capital. 
The  inn  at  which  he  stayed  under  an  assumed  name  is  now  the 
Hotel  English,  and  Napoleonic  pictures  hang  on  the  walls 
which  echoed  his  memorable  exclamation  as  he  compared  the 
pomp  of  June  with  the  plight  of  December,  ''It  is  but  a  step 
from  the  sublime  to  the  ridiculous. ' ' 

A  knock  at  the  door  of  the  French  embassy  at  Dresden  was 
the  first  announcement  of  his  return  to  the  Saxon  capital, 
which  had  last  seen  him  with  the  monarchs  of  Europe  at  his 
feet.  Now  he  came  in  the  night,  without  trumpeters  or  even 
servants,  and  borrowed  $800  and  six  shirts  for  the  rest  of  his 
homeward  flight. 

At  Weimar,  the  sleighing  grew  poor  and  he  changed  to  a 
carriage.     This  time,  however,  he  did  not  venture  into  the 


360  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

castle,  as  after  the  Battle  of  Jena,  but  excused  himself  to  the 
Duchess  of  Weimar  on  the  ground  that  he  was  not  present- 
able. 

For  three  weeks  Paris  had  heard  not  a  word  from  the  Em- 
peror or  the  army  until  the  appearance  one  morning  in 
December  of  the  last  bulletin  penned  at  Smorgoni.  The  next 
night  at  eleven-thirty,  after  Marie  Louise  had  gone  to  sleep, 
Napoleon,  disguised  in  furs  beyond  her  ready  recognition, 
burst  in  upon  the  Empress. 

In  the  morning,  Paris  awoke  to  the  startling  report  that  in- 
stead of  being  in  Russia,  battling  with  snowdrifts,  the  Em- 
peror was  safe  in  his  palace  and  would  hold  a  levee  at  nine. 
In  her  surprise,  the  excited  city  all  but  forgot  to  ask  him  what 
had  become  of  the  Grand  Army,  and  France  promptly  rose 
at  his  call  to  face  allied  Europe  once  more. 


CHAPTER  XLII 

THE  RISING  OF  THE  PEOPLES 

1813     AGE   43 

E]MBOLDENED  by  the  calamity  that  had  overwhelmed 
Napoleon  and  his  army  in  the  Russian  campaign,  the 
people  of  Germany  rose  in  the  summer  of  1813  and  fell 
upon  him.  The  leader  of  that  great  popular  uprising  was 
none  other  than  Alexander  I,  the  autocrat  of  all  the  Russias, 
who  presented  himself  as  the  deliverer  of  the  nations  from  the 
tyranny  of  the  French. 

Napoleon  could  not  believe  that  the  continent  would  trust 
itself  to  such  a  leadership.  He  never  ceased  to  admonish  the 
countries  of  the  west  to  beware  of  the  Russian  peril,  which  he 
himself  had  always  viewed  with  dread.  No  doubt  he  was 
honestly  persuaded  that  he  was  defending  civilisation  when 
he  marshalled  the  hosts  of  twenty  nations  and  led  them  against 
the  Czar,  and  he  was  equally  sincere  at  St.  Helena  when  he 
raised  the  warning  cry,  "In  ten  years,  Europe  can  be  all 
Cossack  or  all  republican." 

Diplomacy  as  well  as  politics  makes  strange  bedfellows, 
however,  and  in  1914,  England  and  France  appeared  as  the 
allies  of  the  Slav  against  the  Teuton.  Napoleon  failed  to  fore- 
see the  development  of  the  great  Germanic  Empire  which 
would  avenge  Jena  at  Sedan ;  challenge  England  on  the  sea 
and  divide  the  west  in  a  political  and  economic  rivalry.  Thus 
in  the  War  of  the  Nations,  France  and  England  joined  with 
Russia  against  the  Germans  just  as  100  years  ago  Germany 
and  England  joined  with  her  against  the  French. 

All  of  Napoleon's  fellow  sovereigns  shared  in  some  degree 
his  distrust  of  Russia,  when  in  the  spring  of  1813,  the  aveng- 
ing Czar  entered  Germany  in  pursuit  of  the  wreck  of  the  re- 

361 


362  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

treating  Grand  Army.  ''Napoleon  or  I,  I  or  Napoleon," 
Alexander  had  exclaimed.  "We  cannot  reign  side  by  side." 
The  earth  was  not  large  enough  to  be  divided  with  the  Corsi- 
can. 

The  subjugated  monarchs  of  the  west  drew  back  from  the 
offer  of  the  Czar  to  be  their  defender.  They  seemed  for  a 
time  to  prefer  even  the  chains  of  the  French  and  the  ills  they 
had,  rather  than  fly  to  others  unknown  which  the  Slavs  might 
bring  upon  them.  The  Emperor  of  Austria  and  the  King  of 
Prussia  equally  dreaded  the  thirst  of  the  Russian  bear  for 
the  waters  of  the  Hellespont  and  the  Vistula. 

While  the  crowned  heads  of  Europe  hesitated  between  a 
choice  of  evils,  their  subjects  hailed  Alexander  as  a  saviour 
and  they  welcomed  as  friends  and  brothers  the  wild  horse- 
men from  the  Valley  of  the  Don  as  they  loped  across  the 
German  plains  clear  to  the  gates  of  Hamburg.  The  German 
people  sprang  to  arms  and,  throwing  off  the  galling  yoke  of 
the  French,  drew  around  the  hated  conqueror  of  Jena,  a 
guerdon  of  fire  and  iron. 

Napoleon  might  still  be  the  ally  of  kings  but  he  was  no 
longer  the  son  of  the  Revolution  and  the  hope  and  champion 
of  mankind.  On  the  contrary,  he  saw  the  inspiring  title  of 
Liberator,  which  he  wore  in  his  magic  youth,  caught  up  by  a 
Russian  Czar  and  flaunted  on  the  banners  of  the  Cossacks, 
who  snatched  from  him  the  watchwords  of  patriotism  and 
liberty  which  in  other  days  had  fired  his  legion  with  an  irre- 
sistible passion.  Patriots  were  no  longer  behind  him  but 
were  in  front  of  him  and  they  challenged  him  whichever  way 
he  turned,  whether  in  Spain,  in  Russia  or  in  Germany. 

Byron  and  Tom  Moore  sing  the  unhappy  lot  of  the  eagle 
which  saw  his  own  feathers  plucked  to  wing  the  darts  that 
brought  him  to  his  doom.     Such  was  the  fate  of  Napoleon. 

In  vain  he  appealed  to  his  new  allies,  the  kings  and  princes, 
to  help  him  beat  back  the  tide  of  popular  feeling.  Fatuously 
imagining  that  the  bond  of  blood  was  as  sacred  and  strong 
among  the  Hapsburgs  as  the  Corsicans,  he  looked  upon  Marie 
Louise  and  her  baby  as  hostages  of  peace  between  Austria  and 
France. 


THE  EISING  OF  THE  PEOPLES  363 

While  he  was  relying  on  a  young  woman  and  a  teething 
child,  a  poor  little  German  girl,  without  a  crown  and  without 
a  title,  influenced  the  destinies  of  nations  far  more  than  the 
daughter  and  the  grandson  of  the  Hapsburgs.  When  that 
simple  fraulein  sold  her  finger  rings  for  $1.50  and  gave  the 
money  for  the  triumph  of  her  fatherland,  the  loyal  women  of 
Germany  caught  the  infection  of  her  spirit  of  sacrifice  and 
heaped  upon  the  altar  of  patriotism  not  only  their  rings  but 
all  their  gold  and  silver  as  well.  As  many  as  150,000  German 
frauen,  we  are  told,  pulled  the  wedding  rings  off  their  fingers 
and  dumped  them  in  the  mint,  gladly  taking  and  proudly 
wearing  in  exchange  iron  rings  inscribed,  "Gold  I  gave  for 
iron. ' ' 

Although  Goethe  might  smile  and  say  to  the  Germans, 
"Shake  your  chains,  if  you  will;  Napoleon  is  too  strong  for 
you;  you  will  not  break  them,"  simpler  minds  were  braver 
and  truer.  The  spirit  of  Queen  Louise  walked  abroad ;  songs 
of  freedom  burst  upon  the  land  and  the  church,  the  school 
and  the  home  were  leagued  for  German  independence. 

AVhen  the  patriot  politicians  had  induced  Frederick  Wil- 
liam to  leave  Berlin,  which  was  still  only  a  French  garrison, 
the  Prussian  King  was  quickly  swept  away  on  the  tide  of 
patriotism.  Austria,  however,  declared  an  armed  neutrality, 
but  one  of  her  ablest  statesmen,  Count  Stadion,  only  foretold 
the  truth  when  he  said,  ' '  We  are  no  longer  master  of  our  own 
affairs;  the  tide  of  events  will  carry  us  along." 

The  Empire  and  the  church  still  were  at  war.  The  Em- 
peror Francis  having  appealed  to  his  son-in-law  to  deal  more 
gently  "with  the  Pope,  Napoleon  had  ordered  Pius  VII  to  be 
brought  from  Savona  to  Fontainebleau  in  1812.  There,  in  the 
great  palace,  the  prisoner  was  installed  in  spacious  apartments, 
with  carriages  and  servants  at  his  command.  But  Pius  de- 
clined the  favours  of  his  captor  and  dwelt  like  a  hermit  in  the 
sumptuous  chateau. 

Napoleon  never  was  so  futile  against  any  other  antagonist 
as  against  the  gentle  shepherd  of  the  flock  of  Rome,  whose 
Empire,  unarmed  and  invisible,  calmly  withstood  the  assaults 
of  the  Great  Captain.     "Alexander  declared  himself  the  son 


364  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

of  Jupiter,  and  in  my  time,"  he  complained,  "I  find  a  priest 
more  powerful  than  I  am!" 

When  the  year  1813  opened,  France  was  a  nation  disarmed 
and  worse  than  that.  Her  best  fighting  men  and  her  war 
material  were  either  buried  beneath  the  Russian  snows  or 
were  hotly  enlisted  in  the  Spanish  campaign  against  the  allied 
Spaniards  and  English  under  Wellington.  Two  decades  of 
warfare  had  drained  the  country  of  its  military  resources 
and  left  it  in  a  state  of  exhaustion  which  many  biologists 
contend  is  reflected  to  this  day  in  the  national  birth  rate. 

The  land  had  been  combed  again  and  again,  and  now  it 
had  to  be  combed  with  fine  teeth.  The  sons  of  the  well-to-do 
who  had  been  avoiding  service  by  paying  from  $2500  to  $5000 
for  substitutes  were  raked  in  along  with  those  who  had  drawn 
lucky  numbers  in  the  yearly  draft.  For  three  years  the  an- 
nual conscription  had  been  anticipated  to  meet  the  demands 
of  the  Spanish,  Wagram  and  Russian  campaigns,  and  the 
youth  of  the  nation  had  been  called  to  the  colours  a  year  in 
advance  of  the  normal  time.  Now  another  forced  loan  was 
extorted  from  the  future,  and  the  conscripts  of  1814  were 
snatched  from  their  mothers  in  the  beginning  of  1813. 

The  adult  male  population  of  the  country  had  been  win- 
nowed so  often  that  hardly  anything  remained  but  the  chaff. 
The  physical  standards  of  recruiting  were  lowered  to  catch  all 
who  were  big  enough  to  carry  a  musket.  Many  of  the  recruits 
were  so  small  or  young  that  Savary,  the  minister  of  police, 
objected  to  their  drilling  before  the  jeering  crowds  of  cynical 
Paris. 

The  equine  race  had  suffered  with  the  human  from  the 
desolation  of  the  wars.  The  country  was  without  horses  old 
and  strong  enough  to  draw  the  artillery,  and  that  branch  was 
seriously  crippled  by  animals  too  young  and  small  for  the 
load. 

In  the  face  of  all  difficulties,  Napoleon  had  an  army  of  more 
than  200,000  soldiers  in  Germany,  with  600  cannon,  when  he 
left  Paris  for  the  front  at  one  o'clock  of  an  April  morning. 
As  he  was  leaving,  he  invested  the  Empress  with  the  regency 
and  bade  good-bye  to  the  little  King  of  Rome,  who  in  vain  had 


THE  RISING  OF  THE  PEOPLES  365 

been  lisping  the  prayer  for  peace  which  his  governess  taught 
him. 

In  less  than  four  months  since  his  return  from  Russia  the 
Emperor  had  built  up  a  new  army  on  the  wreck  of  the  Grand 
Army.  It  is  well  to  remember  that  he  had  to  do  it  without 
telegraphs  or  telephones,  without  railways  or  automobiles, 
without  even  a  press  to  aid  him  in  rallying  and  enrolling  the 
people  and  in  organising  and  supplying  his  forces. 

Thanks  to  his  own  titanic  labours,  he  was  enabled  to  cross 
the  Rhine  with  nearly  twice  as  many  men  as  the  Russians 
and  the  Prussians  had  been  able  to  assemble  against  him. 
Few,  however,  had  ever  smelled  powder  and  most  of  them  had 
to  be  taught  to  load  a  musket.  The  majority  of  their  cor- 
porals, sergeants,  lieutenants  and  captains  also  were  strangers 
to  war.  The  veteran  officers  of  the  lower  grades  as  well  as  the 
veterans  in  the  ranks  lay  beneath  the  wheat  fields  of  the 
Danube,  in  the  valleys  and  on  the  Sierras  of  Spain,  or  on 
the  Russian  steppes.  Moreover,  the  very  soul  of  the  army 
was  dead  and  its  commander  no  longer  wore  the  aureole  of 
victory. 

The  foe,  on  the  other  hand,  not  only  had  stolen  away  the 
spirit  of  the  Grand  Army,  but  many  of  the  officers  of  the 
Prussian  contingent  also  had  borrowed  leaves  from  the  mas- 
ter's book  of  recipes  for  making  war  and  they  understood  the 
Napoleonic  method  as  well  as  his  own  marshals.  They  had 
not  served  for  nothing  a  seven  years'  apprenticeship  since 
Jena. 

Although  Napoleon  had  sternly  limited  the  army  of  con- 
quered Prussia  to  42,000  men,  its  staff  had  been  smart  enough 
to  give  vacations  by  the  wholesale  and  call  up  new  men  to  sub- 
stitute, thus  making  the  little  organisation  a  training  school 
for  many  more  than  the  stipulated  number.  At  the  out- 
break of  the  war,  the  King  had  recalled  General  Bliieher  from 
a  banishment  which  he  had  incurred  by  his  fiery  rebellion 
against  the  French  domination,  and  had  placed  him  in  com- 
mand. 

Like  most  of  the  patriot  leaders  who  had  aroused  Prussia, 
Bliieher  was  not  a  Prussian  but  a  native  of  a  minor  German 


366  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

state.  An  old  man  of  seventy-two,  his  flaming  hatred  of 
Napoleon  filled  him  with  the  ardour  of  youth  and,  although 
an  illiterate,  hard-drinking,  loud-swearing,  tumultuous  char- 
acter, his  natural  fighting  qualities  made  up  for  his  lack  of 
technical  knowledge. 

The  Allies,  however,  suffered  from  a  divided  command. 
The  Slavs  would  not  tolerate  a  Teuton  over  them  and  the 
Russians  had  not  yet  developed  a  high  order  of  generalship 
among  themselves.  Kutusof  had  died  just  as  he  finished  his 
long  chase  of  Napoleon,  and  the  Russian  Czar  was  the  real 
commander  of  his  contingent  in  the  allied  army  in  Germany. 
Alexander  had  no  special  military  training,  but  he  was  served 
by  a  fairly  sound  common  sense. 

The  Russians  and  Prussians  undertook  first  of  all  to  wrest 
Saxony  from  Napoleon's  control,  and  that  kingdom  bore  the 
brunt  of  the  entire  war  of  1813.  For  six  months  the  Saxon 
plains  were  trampled  by  the  armies  of  all  the  nations  of  Eu- 
rope ;  humble  homes  were  laid  waste,  and  the  sickle  of  Death 
reaped  in  the  fields  where  the  toiling  peasants  had  sown, 
while  in  the  desperation  of  a  loser,  the  discarded  favourite 
gambled  with  fate.  For  a  half  year  the  hurricane  of  war 
swept  back  and  forth  over  a  battle  ground  ninety  miles  long 
and  forty  miles  wide. 

The  storm  first  broke  in  full  fury  on  an  afternoon  in  early 
May  at  Liitzen,  near  where  Gustavus  Adolphus  found  his 
grave  and  where  the  land  rolls  away  to  the  mountains  of  Bo- 
hemia. At  the  end  of  a  bloody  half-day  struggle  between 
180,000  men,  there  came  that  inevitable  hour  of  weariness  and 
irresolution  for  which  Napoleon  always  waited  and  watched 
in  the  ebb  and  flow  of  the  battle  tide.  Then  he  called  out, 
"Eighty  guns,  Drouot!"  The  guns,  being  quickly  parked, 
opened  their  mouths  and  poured  forth  a  torrent  of  iron  and 
fire  which  tore  through  the  enemy 's  line  and  put  the  Allies  to 
flight.     AVar  was  terribly  simple  with  Napoleon. 

After  the  battle  was  won  and  finished,  a  Prussian  cavalry 
brigade  made  a  spurt  that  surprised  and  broke  up  the  Em- 
peror's own  escort.  In  the  confusion  and  the  darkness,  he 
was  separated  even  from  his  staff,  and  after  the  flurry  was 


THE  RISING  OF  THE  PEOPLES  367 

over  had  to  gallop  about  to  tind  his  aides.  He  had  already 
begun  to  display  that  heedlessness  of  peril  which  characterised 
his  last  campaigns,  when,  seeming  to  challenge  the  fickle  god- 
dess to  do  her  worst,  his  grey  coat  was  carelessly  offered  in 
nearly  every  engagement  as  a  target  for  the  slings  and  arrows 
that  outrageous  fortune  was  raining  upon  his  empire.  His 
suite  often  could  not  avoid  the  risks  he  ran,  and  Bessieres, 
commander  of  the  Guard,  was  killed  on  the  eve  of  the  fight 
at  Liitzen,  the  second  marshal  of  the  Empire  to  fall,  Lannes 
having  been  the  first. 

As  the  Battle  of  Liitzen  was  fought  near  the  last  battle 
ground  of  Gustavus  Adolphus,  so  the  Battle  of  Bautzen  was 
waged  three  weeks  afterward  close  by  a  field  already  made 
memorable  by  Frederick  the  Great.  In  its  gentle  descent 
from  the  mountainous  frontier  of  Bohemia,  through  the  fa- 
mous Spreewald  and  on  to  Berlin,  the  River  Spree  washes 
no  walls  more  picturesque  than  those  of  the  little  city  of 
Bautzen,  whose  quaint  mediaeval  towers  stood  witness  to  the 
deadly  grapple  of  more  than  200,000  men  as  they  swirled  for 
two  days  about  the  hillocks  that  rise  from  the  countryside. 

In  the  fighting  on  the  first  day.  Napoleon  drove  the  Czar 
and  the  Allies  out  of  the  town,  and  that  night  the  camp  fires 
of  his  army  formed  a  flaming  line  nine  miles  long.  At  five 
in  the  morning  of  the  second  day,  he  was  in  the  saddle  and 
riding  among  his  troops,  and  at  three  he  announced  to  them 
that  the  battle  was  won.  The  chimes  were  sounding  five  in 
the  belfry  of  the  cathedral  of  Bautzen,  where  for  nearly 
300  years  now  Catholics  and  Protestants  have  used  the  same 
altar,  when  the  Czar  ordered  the  defeated  army  of  the  alliance 
to  retreat  through  the  Silesian  gorges. 

The  losses  of  both  sides  together  aggregated  not  far  from 
40,000.  Napoleon  had  won  another  victory  but  it  was  as 
costly  and  bootless  as  that  of  Liitzen.  For  through  a  misun- 
derstanding of  orders  on  the  part  of  Ney,  the  Russians  and 
Prussians,  who  could  and  should  have  been  cut  off  and 
smashed,  made  good  their  escape,  leading  not  a  button  or  a 
nail  in  the  hands  of  the  victor. 

The  Emperor  hastened  after  the  fleeing  Allies  the  next  day 


368  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

in  an  effort  to  retrieve  the  mistake  and  destroy  the  retreating 
array.  While  he  was  in  hot  pursuit,  a  Russian  gun  was 
trained  upon  him  and  a  ball  hissed  in  his  ear  as  it  tore  past 
him  to  lay  low  Duroc,  the  grand  marshal  of  the  palace,  who 
was  riding  a  few  yards  behind  him. 

Napoleon  turned  to  see  his  devoted  servitor  writhing  in 
pain  from  a  mortal  and  hideous  wound.  The  order  was  given 
to  cease  firing,  and  the  Emperor,  returning  to  his  camp,  seated 
himself  in  the  midst  of  the  Guard  where  he  surrendered  to  his 
emotions  of  grief  over  the  loss  of  an  inseparable  companion 
in  all  the  campaigns  of  the  Empire.  No  other  man  but  Ber- 
thier  had  been  so  closely  associated  with  him,  and  Berthier 
sometimes  quarrelled  with  him.  But  Duroc,  he  used  to  say, 
' '  loves  me  as  a  dog  loves  his  master. ' '  And  faithful  even  in 
the  grave,  he  lies  at  the  gate  of  his  master's  tomb  in  the  In- 
valides. 

When  Napoleon  resumed  the  chase  in  the  morning  the  Rus- 
sians and  Prussians  continued  to  flee  before  him  and  to  quar- 
rel among  themselves.  He  had  been  in  the  field  only  five 
weeks  and  had  won  two  great  battles,  swept  back  the  enemy 
from  the  Saale  to  the  Oder,  a  distance  of  more  than 
200  miles,  and  filled  the  counsels  of  the  Allies  with  dis- 
sension. 

Although  he  had  200,000  men  at  his  command  against  not 
more  than  130,000,  still  without  horses  for  his  cavalry,  he 
despaired  of  overwhelming  this  smaller  force.  He  had  found 
it  harder  to  get  horses  than  men — or  boys.  He  was  ready, 
therefore,  to  welcome  a  pause  in  the  campaign.  Moreover,  he 
was  fast  driving  his  foes  upon  the  Austrian  frontier  and  into 
the  arms  of  his  father-in-law,  who,  he  feared,  thus  would  be 
drawn  into  the  alliance  against  him. 

In  the  presence  of  that  delicate  situation  he  did  a  thing 
alien  thitherto  to  Napoleonic  warfare — he  dropped  his  hands 
and  stopped  fighting.  Accepting  the  mediation  of  Austria, 
he  entered  into  an  armistice  for  two  and  a  half  months  with 
the  Czar  and  the  King  of  Prussia,  a  truce  that  was  to  prove 
fatal  to  his  cause. 


CHAPTER  XLIII 
THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS 

1313      AGE   43-44 

NAPOLEON,  the  Czar  and  the  King  of  Prussia  called  the 
truce,  only  for  the  purpose  of  resuming  the  struggle 
with  heavier  forces.  Although  a  peace  congress  was 
to  assemble  at  Prague,  peace  was  not  the  object  of  the  armis- 
tice on  either  side. 

Napoleon  needed  horses  and  his  allied  foes  equally  needed 
human  reinforcements.  Above  all,  both  sides  wished  to  enter 
into  negotiations  with  Austria,  which  had  adopted  a  policy 
of  armed  neutrality. 

The  matrimonial  alliance  of  the  Bonapartes  and  the  Haps- 
burgs  was  cast  in  the  scale  and  weighed  when  Lletternich 
came  to  Dresden  to  hold  an  interview  that  has  become  his- 
toric. Napoleon  had  taken  up  his  residence  in  the  ^larcolini 
palace,  then  a  beautiful  villa  in  the  suburbs  of  Dresden,  but 
now  converted  and  enlarged  into  a  great  hospital.  In  the 
long,  stony  corridors  and  spacious  salons,  where  the  imperial 
Corsican  diffused  his  favourite  perfume  of  eau  de  cologne,  the 
air  is  heavy  to-day  with  the  pungent  odour  of  disinfectants. 
The  walls,  which  now  echo  the  plaintive  murmurs  of  the  suf- 
fering, once  resounded  with  the  voices  of  marshals  and  cour- 
tiers and  of  the  celebrated  actors  of  the  Comedie  Francaise, 
who  came  on  from  Paris  to  amuse  the  Emperor  in  the  lull  of 
warfare. 

One  room  only  in  all  the  palace  hospital  remains  as  it  was. 
It  has  been  preserved  in  memory  of  the  day  when,  within  its 
precincts,  a  mighty  empire  tossed  in  its  crisis,  while  Napoleon 
wrestled  with  Metternich  in  a  vain  effort  to  keep  Austria  from 
taking  up  arms  against  him. 

3G9 


370    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

For  nine  hours  they  grappled  and  struggled  in  that  room, 
where  the  Emperor  exclaimed,  "Ah,  Metternich !  How  much 
has  England  given  you  to  play  this  part  against  me?"  The 
same  dragons  still  contort  themselves  on  the  inlaid  floor;  the 
same  desk  continues  to  stand  in  the  corner,  and  the  windows 
look  out  upon  the  fountains  in  the  same  park,  where  the  King 
of  Saxony  and  the  imperial  dignitaries  anxiously  waited  for 
the  momentous  decision,  but  where  in  this  time  the  con- 
valescent patients  take  the  healing  air.  And  hold !  Is  not 
that  the  veritable  door  knob,  which  Napoleon  gripped  at  dusk, 
when  the  long  interview  was  at  an  end  and  when  the  depart- 
ing Metternich,  as  his  memoirs  would  have  us  believe,  pro- 
nounced the  doom  of  the  Empire:  "You  are  a  ruined  man. 
Sire.  I  had  a  presentiment  of  it  when  I  came  here;  now  I 
am  sure  of  it ! " 

Lletternich  offered  him  peace  if  he  would  only  content  him- 
self with  France,  Belgium,  Holland,  and  Italy,  and  the  Em- 
peror's counsellors  implored  him  to  accept  those  apparently 
liberal  terms,  which  would  have  left  him  a  far  wider  do- 
minion than  any  other  French  monarch  ever  had  possessed. 
Already  he  had  lost  Spain,  and  even  while  he  was  at  Dresden, 
he  received  the  news  of  the  flight  of  Joseph  Bonaparte  from 
that  country.  Jerome  Bonaparte's  kingdom  of  Westphalia 
was  fast  being  engulfed  in  the  tide  of  German  patriotism,  and 
Louis  had  thrown  away  his  crown  of  Holland.  Furthermore, 
the  vassal  states  in  the  Confederation  of  the  Ehine  were  aban- 
doning Napoleon  day  by  day. 

Metternich 's  liberality,  however,  was  somewhat  illusory,  for 
both  sides  really  were  bent  on  fighting  to  a  finish.  As  al- 
ways, England  was  the  backbone  and  the  purse  pocket  of  the 
alliance.  She  did  not  wish  to  make  peace  until  France  was 
shut  up  within  the  boundaries  that  confined  her  in  the  igno- 
minious days  of  Louis  XV,  In  twenty  years  of  nearly  con- 
tinuous warfare,  England  had  been  Napoleon's  most  constant 
foe.  Yet  he  had  not  seen  an  English  soldier.  The  British 
contingent  in  Spain  under  Wellington  had  brought  confusion 
upon  his  marshals,  but  England  had  fought  the  master  him- 
self with   gold  rather  than.  lead.     British,  agents   were   in 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS  371 

every  camp  of  the  Allies,  and  were  the  paymasters  of  the 
allied  sovereigns. 

Napoleon  made  a  pretence  of  yielding  almost  everything, 
but  he  was  still  insisting  on  keeping  Hamburg,  Bremen  and 
one  or  two  other  dots  on  the  map  of  Germany,  when  the  bells 
of  Prague  struck  the  midnight  hour  on  the  10th  of  August. 
Instantly  bonfires  flamed  up  from  the  hilltops  clear  to  the 
Silesian  frontier,  as  a  signal  that  the  armistice  was  over. 

The  truce  of  ten  weeks  had  been  far  more  profitable  to  the 
Allies  than  to  Napoleon.  Not  only  had  Austria  been  drawn 
to  their  side,  but  Bernadotte,  Crown  Prince  of  Sweden,  with 
a  small  contingent  of  Swedes  generously  subsidised  by  Eng- 
land, also  had  come  to  join  in  the  attack  upon  the  tricolour 
flag,  beneath  whose  favouring  folds  he  had  risen  from  the 
peasantry  to  royalty.  IMoreover,  the  Russians  and  Prussians 
themselves  had  brought  up  two  new  men  for  every  recruit 
that  Napoleon  had  been  able  to  call  to  his  standard.  Against 
his  350,000  troops  and  1200  guns  at  the  reopening  of  the  war, 
the  Allies  had  no  less  than  a  full  half  million  actually  in  the 
field  with  1400  cannon,  and  they  had  also  enormous  reserves. 
The  total  of  all  Napoleon's  forces  everywhere  was  less  than 
600,000,  nearly  180,000  of  whom  were  wasting  themselves  in 
Spain  and  Italy  and  in  German  fortresses,  while  his  foes  had 
more  than  one  million  men  enrolled  beneath  their  banners. 

Confidence  reigned  in  the  allied  headquarters,  where, 
around  the  avenging  Czar,  a  motley  group  had  been  drawn 
together  from  the  ends  of  the  earth  with  no  other  motive  in 
common  than  their  envy  or  hatred  of  the  colossus,  who  had  so 
long  bestrode  the  narrow  world.  There  was  Frederick  Wil- 
liam of  Prussia,  who  saw  at  last  his  chance  to  break  his  chains 
and  revenge  himself  for  Jena  and  Tilsit.  There  were  Eng- 
lish representatives,  who  had  camped  on  Napoleon's  trail  for 
twenty  years,  and  among  them  was  Col.  Hudson  Lowe, 
ready  to  bind  the  fallen  giant  and  drag  him  to  his  rock  of 
captivity. 

Irreconcilable  emigres,  whom  the  usurper  in  his  glory  had 
been  unable  to  lure  from  their  Bourbon  allegiance,  were  gath- 
ered like  huntsmen  when  the  game  is  run  to  cover.     One  of 


372  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

them  was  his  old  seat  mate  in  the  military  school  of  Paris, 
where  three  boys  sat  in  a  row — Phelippeaux,  Picot  de  Peccaduc, 
and  Napoleon  Bonaparte — and  the  first  named  and  the  last 
kicked  at  each  other  behind  the  desk  until  the  second,  who  sat 
between,  had  to  move  his  wounded  legs  from  the  firing  line. 
Phelippeaux  settled  his  score  at  the  gate  of  Acre,  where  he 
mounted  the  guns  on  the  wall  for  the  Turks  and  stopped  his 
schoolroom  enemy  in  his  march  to  win  an  empire  in  the  east. 
Now  Picot  was  on  the  staff  of  the  Austrian  commander,  Prince 
Schwarzenberg,  where,  after  twenty-five  years,  he  was  fondly 
hoping  to  avenge  his  shins. 

The  ubiquitous  Pozzi  di  Borgo,  that  Corsican  Nemesis,  was 
there  of  course,  panting  with  an  unslaked  thirst  for  revenge, 
and  eager  to  carry  to  the  bitter  end  a  neighbourhood  quarrel 
begun  in  the  streets  of  Ajaccio.  "Napoleon  needed  only  one 
man  to  have  become  the  master  of  the  world  and  I  am  that 
man."     Such  was  Pozzo's  boast  in  all  the  after  years. 

By  the  side  of  that  relentless  vendettist  was  a  man  whose 
hate  was  younger  but  no  smaller.  This  was  Moreau,  the  victor 
in  the  Battle  of  Hohenliuden.  Moreau 's  wife  and  mother-in- 
law  being  from  Martinique,  had  rebelled  against  the  exaltation 
of  their  sister  islander,  Josephine,  and  estranged  the  general 
from  Napoleon,  who  banished  him  to  America  at  the  time  of 
the  Bourbon  plot  and  the  shooting  of  the  Duke  d'Enghien. 
There  is  a  tradition  that  President  Madison  offered  the  refugee 
the  command  of  the  American  army  in  the  War  of  1812. 
After  an  exile  of  more  than  eight  years  on  the  banks  of  the 
Delaware,  he  was  tempted  by  an  emissary  of  the  Czar  to  re- 
turn to  Europe,  and  join  in  bringing  down  the  eagle. 

The  Czar  had  drawn  one  man  to  his  side  out  of  the  very 
camp  of  Napoleon.  That  was  General  Jomini,  the  Swiss 
banker  who  had  divined  and  published  the  wizard's  tricks  of 
military'  magic  but  had  grown  dissatisfied  with  his  rewards  as 
a  member  of  Marshal  Ney  's  staff  and  had  changed  flags  in  the 
course  of  the  armistice. 

One  alone  in  the  crowd  at  the  allied  headquarters  could 
not  frankly  share  the  general  rejoicing  over  the  prospect  of 
upsetting  the  Napoleonic  throne.    Francis  of  Austria  was 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS  373 

unable  to  forget  that  his  daughter  was  sitting  upon  it  and  his 
grandson  was  playing  about  its  steps.  A  father's  love  and  a 
monarch's  ambition  were  tearing  the  Austrian  Emperor's 
emotions  between  them  as  he  moved  among  the  confident  plot- 
ters for  the  overthrow  of  his  son-in-law.  He  drew  back  from 
the  Czar's  table  when  he  saw  Jomini  seated  at  it.  "I  very 
well  understand  that  it  is  necessary  to  avail  ourselves  of  spies 
and  traitors,  but  is  it  necessary  to  break  bread  with  them?" 
Francis  inquired. 

Among  all  the  cooks  at  the  allied  headquarters,  there  was 
no  chef.  The  sovereigns  were  too  jealous  and  suspicious 
to  choose  one  of  themselves  to  be  commander-in-chief,  and 
there  was  no  general  of  the  first  rank  among  the  Russians, 
Prussians  and  Austrians.  Besides,  the  oil  and  water  of  Slav 
and  Teuton  persistently  refused  to  mix. 

The  greatest  general  of  modern  times,  therefore,  must  be 
beaten  by  an  army  without  a  general,  and  the  allied  forces 
were  divided  into  three  armies  under  independent  com- 
manders. There  was,  however,  a  common  plan  of  campaign, 
chiefly  the  work  of  Moreau.  Its  salient  principle  was  to  keep 
out  of  Napoleon's  way  and  whip  his  marshals. 

The  Emperor,  never  suspecting  the  scheme  to  refuse  him  a 
battle,  made  a  lunge  at  Bliicher  on  his  front  as  soon  as  the 
war  was  on  again.  The  old  Prussian  only  drew  back  into  the 
Silesian  gorges,  whereupon  the  allied  sovereigns  themselves 
began  to  move  up  into  Saxony.  This  menace  behind  him 
obliged  Napoleon  to  hasten  back  to  Dresden,  whither  he  flew 
with  truly  Napoleonic  swiftness,  marching  the  Guard  through 
120  miles  of  mud  in  four  days. 

The  sovereigns  had  100,000  men  in  hand  when  they  arrived 
on  the  heights  of  Dresden.  Although  they  knew  that  Napo- 
leon was  absent  and  that  the  defences  were  manned  by  hardly 
20,000  men,  they  flinched  from  the  attack  and  decided  to 
wait  for  the  remaining  half  of  their  army  to  come  up. 
While  they  waited,  the  Emperor  raced  into  the  city  and  took 
his  stand  at  the  head  of  the  bridge  over  the  Elbe  to  stir  his 
tired  and  sleepy  men  when  they  crossed  the  river.  As  their 
cheers  of  "Vive  I'Empereur"  mounted  in  waves  to  the  hills 


374  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

behind  the  town,  the  camp  of  the  Allies  was  filled  with  dis- 
may. They  knew  now  that  they  had  the  lion  in  front  of 
them. 

Napoleonic  battlefields  generally  are  fair  to  see.  None  is 
fairer  than  the  field  of  Dresden,  for  it  is  all  but  overgrown 
to-day  with  the  streets  and  homes  and  lawns  of  that  fairest 
of  the  fair  among  the  beautiful  cities  of  Germany.  In  the 
battle  time,  the  Saxon  capital  was  not  the  imposing  city  of 
more  than  half  a  million  people  that  it  is  to-day,  but  only  a 
big  town  of  30,000.  The  village  lanes  and  peasant  fields,  in 
which  the  armies  of  all  the  nations  fought  for  two  days,  have 
given  way  to  the  broad  thoroughfares  and  handsome  resi- 
dences of  the  modern  city.  The  villas  and  pensions  and 
schools  of  the  Anglo-American  colony  to-day  are  set  almost 
in  the  centre  of  the  battle  ground,  where  the  Cossack  spears 
and  the  French  lances  clashed  in  furious  combat,  while  the 
trees  were  shattered  and  the  sward  was  crimsoned  in  that 
lovely  old  park,  the  Grosser  Garten, 

Napoleon's  battle  line  is  now  lost  in  the  expanded  business 
section,  where  the  clamour  of  arms  has  been  succeeded  by  the 
no  less  clamorous  street  cars  and  automobiles.  The  red 
tide  flowed  almost  to  the  walls  of  the  royal  palace,  where  the 
Emperor  was  a  guest  of  the  King  and  where  in  these  days  the 
tourists  linger  in  the  apartments  he  occupied. 

The  battle  broke  at  four  in  the  afternoon,  when  the 
sovereigns  from  their  hill  hurled  their  Russians,  Prussians 
and  Austrians  upon  the  redoubts  of  the  French.  The  storm 
of  fire  did  not  subside  until  midnight.  But  that  first  day  was 
only  a  draw. 

As  early  as  six  the  next  morning,  Napoleon  was  out  on 
the  firing  line  again.  He  stood  in  his  tent  door  before  a  huge 
bonfire  while  he  dried  his  clothes  which  were  soaking  with  the 
rain  that  descended  in  floods.  After  the  mingled  storms  of 
fire  and  water  had  beaten  upon  the  two  armies  for  hours,  he 
delivered  the  decisive  stroke  in  the  afternoon,  when  he  sent 
Murat  and  25,000  men  with  seventy -five  guns  to  hurl  them- 
selves upon  the  left  flank  of  the  enemy.  The  horsemen  slashed 
their  way  with  lance  and  sword  and  rode  down  the  allied 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS  375 

infantry,  whose  flintlocks  were  so  wet  they  could  not  fire. 
The  entire  wing  was  swept  away  and  10,000  of  the  foe  stacked 
their  useless  weapons  and  surrendered. 

That  was  the  finishing  blow  which  spread  consternation 
through  the  ranks  of  the  Allies  and  won  the  battle.  In  the 
two  days  of  fighting  the  sovereigns  had  lost  15,000  men  killed 
and  wounded  and  20,000  taken  prisoners,  while  Napoleon 's  loss 
was  10,000. 

The  allied  army,  however,  was  only  beaten ;  it  was  not 
broken.  And  a  battle  is  not  fought  to  conquer  a  few  acres  of 
ground  but  to  conquer  an  army. 

Alas!  the  victor  of  Dresden,  tired,  wet,  and  bedraggled, 
stopped  to  dry  and  rest  himself  rather  than  complete  his  vic- 
tory. With  his  cocked  hat  dissolved  into  a  shapeless  mass  and 
hanging  over  his  ears,  he  mounted  his  horse  at  four  o'clock 
and  trotted  into  the  town.  The  water  dripped  from  the 
skirts  and  sleeves  of  his  grey  coat  as  he  entered  the  palace, 
where  the  King  of  Saxony  embraced  him  and  congratulated 
him  on  one  of  the  most  notable  successes  of  his  career.  He 
had  brought  up  110,000  almost  exhausted  troops,  crossed  a 
river  in  the  face  of  180,000  enemies  and  put  them  to  flight. 

While  he  slept,  the  Allies  made  good  their  escape.  The 
rumble  of  their  wagons  on  retreat  was  heard  through  the 
night,  and  when,  at  dawn,  he  rode  to  the  hill  where  the 
sovereigns  had  stood  the  day  before,  their  hosts  had  vanished 
toward  the  Bohemian  mountains.  Onlj'  a  dog  had  been  left 
behind,  and  his  collar,  inscribed  "I  am  General  Moreau's 
dog,"  is  preserved  among  the  keepsakes  of  Dresden. 

Napoleon  himself  had  all  but  pointed  the  gun  that  brought 
down  the  dog's  master.  When,  in  the  midst  of  the  battle,  he 
had  seen  a  party  of  horsemen  on  the  hill,  he  remarked,  "There 
must  be  some  little  generals  there, ' '  and  he  ordered  his  battery 
to  fire  upon  them.  Had  he  been  facing  his  old  enemy  on  the 
duelling  ground,  he  could  not  have  drawn  a  deadlier  aim  than 
the  battery  drew  on  ]\Ioreau,  who  was  with  the  Czar  in  the 
centre  of  the  group.  The  returned  exile  was  even  then  giving 
Alexander  some  military  advice,  when  the  shot  struck  him  and 
shattered  both  legs. 


376     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  wounded  general  in  a  jolting  vehicle  bore  with  calm 
fortitude  the  agony  of  the  retreat,  and  persisted  until  the  end 
in  debating  the  future  course  of  the  campaign.  Only  the  day 
before  he  died,  he  wrote  to  his  wife :  "At  the  Battle  of  Dres- 
den, three  days  ago,  I  had  both  legs  carried  off  by  a  cannon 
ball.     That  scoundrel  Bonaparte  is  always  fortunate." 

Seldom  does  a  soldier  who  dies  in  arms  against  his  flag  and 
his  country  receive  a  monument.  Not  only  was  Moreau's 
body  sent  to  Petrograd  by  the  Czar's  orders  and  buried  with 
honours  in  the  Roman  Catholic  church  at  the  Russian  capital, 
but  his  memory  was  honoured  also  on  the  spot  where  he 
fell. 

There  is  a  cenotaph  on  the  hill  where  he  stood  beside  Alex- 
ander, when  one  of  Napoleon's  gunners  brought  him  down. 
Over  it  the  green  ivy  climbs  to  decorate  the  sculptured  helmet 
and  sabre  on  the  top.  Three  oaks  mount  guard  about  the 
memorial  stone  and  all  around  an  oat  field  smiles  above  the 
battle-furrowed  ground.  Across  Moreaustrasse  and  down  in 
the  valley,  the  cabbages  in  the  little  gardens  of  the  city  poor 
grow  on  the  graves  of  the  fallen  foemen.  Seemingly  hardly 
more  than  a  mile  away,  the  castle  tower  and  the  church  belfry 
of  the  King's  palace  by  the  Elbe  rise  in  the  midst  of  the  city, 
whose  murmur  ascends  to-day  even  as  the  cheers  for  Napo- 
leon rolled  up  the  height  on  an  August  morning  and  spread 
despair  among  the  Allies. 

The  victory  of  Dresden  was  set  at  naught  in  the  first  month 
of  the  new  campaign.  Napoleon's  lieutenants  lost  150,000 
men  and  300  guns,  while  50,000  sick  and  wounded  crowded  his 
hospitals.  Those  heavy  losses  could  be  repaired  only  by  bor- 
rowing from  the  future,  and  the  Emperor  called  to  his  colours 
160,000  boys,  who  were  not  due  to  give  military  service  until 
1815. 

While  he  continued  week  after  week  to  cling  to  the  worth- 
less ground  he  had  won  at  Dresden,  the  three  allied  armies 
moved  to  unite  behind  him  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Leipsic. 
Thither  at  last  he  betook  himself  in  the  confidence  that  he 
could  whip  them  one  by  one  as  they  came  up. 

He  was  no  longer  choosing  battlefields.     On  the  contrary, 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS  377 

he  was  accepting  the  choice  of  the  enemy.  Having  morally 
planted  himself  on  a  negative,  the  denial  of  the  German  peo- 
ple to  govern  themselves,  he  inevitably  passed  over  to  the 
defensive  in  his  military  operations. 

It  is  an  interesting  coincidence  that  the  two  great  battles  of 
the  war  of  1813  were  fought  under  the  walls  of  the  two  great 
cities  of  Saxony.  Not  that  either  was  much  of  a  city  in  the 
battle  year,  for  Leipsic  with  its  nearly  600,000  popu- 
lation now,  was  then  only  such  a  town  as  Dresden,  Its 
30,000  people  were  huddled  within  an  old  encircling  wall, 
hardly  more  than  two  miles  round,  when  for  three  days  in 
mid-October,  2000  cannon  roared  and  half  a  million  men 
fought  the  Battle  of  the  Nations  at  its  gates. 

On  a  hill  at  the  very  edge  of  the  twentieth  century  Leipsic, 
only  a  short  car  ride  from  the  city  centre,  rises  a  huge  moun- 
tain of  concrete,  a  German  pyramid,  which  in  1913,  on  the 
centenary  of  the  momentous  struggle,  the  Kaiser  William  II, 
great  grandson  of  King  Frederick  William,  dedicated  in  the 
presence  of  the  representatives  of  the  German  states  and  of 
Austria,  Russia  and  Sweden. 

Although  the  pious  motto,  "God  with  Us,"  in  letters  six 
feet  high,  is  carved  above  the  door,  this  memorial  of  Napo- 
leon's overthrow  in  Germany,  with  its  sculptured  mob  of 
pagan  deities,  offers  a  suggestive  contrast  to  the  memorial 
of  his  repulse  from  Eussia,  the  Church  of  Our  Saviour  in 
Moscow.  And  here,  too,  on  the  battlefield  of  the  nations,  the 
Russians  have  reared  a  church  in  memory  of  their  dead  and 
of  their  victory.  But  around  the  lofty  cupola  of  the  German 
monument  at  Leipsic,  bronzed  giants  mount  guard  with  their 
war  clubs,  and  a  gigantic  effig;^^  of  the  German  IMichael  grimly 
stands  sentinel  at  the  portal  in  the  midst  of  a  terrifying  group 
of  furies  who  hold  aloft  flaming  torches  of  destruction,  while 
within,  the  Fates  glower  from  the  walls  of  the  crypt.  This 
surely  is  no  cote  for  the  dove  of  peace,  but  a  massive  temple 
of  war,  the  tabernacle  of  the  sword  and  the  mailed  fist. 

That  giant  cairn  of  German  patriotism  is  heaped  upon  the 
very  mound  where  Napoleon  was  overwhelmed,  but  a  little 
commemorative  stone  almost  hidden  among  the  shrubs  and 


378  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

flowers,  marks  more  precisely  the  position  of  the  man  of 
destiny  when  his  star  shot  across  the  firmament  in  that  October 
evening  and  vanished  behind  the  hills  of  Thuringia. 
On  top  of  this  lesser  monument  lies  a  three-cornered  hat  cut  in 
marble,  while  a  marble  sword  rests  on  a  marble  pillow.  Only 
these  lines  from  Exodus  are  chiselled  on  the  face  of  the 
stone : 


THE  LORD 

IS  A  MAN  OF  WAR 

THE  LORD 

IS  HIS  NAME 


Simply  that  and  nothing  more.  But  the  story  is  told  plainly 
enough  by  the  cocked  hat  and  the  sword,  and  the  exultant 
words  spoken  by  Moses  when  the  Lord  cast  into  the  Red  Sea 
the  chariots  and  host  and  chosen  captains  of  Pharaoh  and  the 
depths  had  covered  them.  The  name  of  the  Corsican  Pharaoh 
does  not  appear  in  the  inscription.     It  would  be  superfluous. 

As  the  visitor  walks  around  the  balcony  of  the  great  monu- 
ment, he  sees  spread  beneath  his  gaze,  the  panorama  of  the 
entire  battlefield  of  the  nations.  As  at  Dresden,  so  at  Leipsic 
Napoleon  occupied  the  town,  and  when  the  Allies  came  to 
drive  him  out  of  it  they  assailed  the  city  on  three  sides  at  once. 
He  himself,  however,  emerged  from  the  southern  gate  and 
faced  his  foes  on  the  field  about  the  monument. 

The  numbers  were  fairly  even  in  that  opening  battle,  but 
for  the  first  time  in  his  life.  Napoleon  failed  to  win  a  fight  be- 
tween equal  forces.  As  night  fell  on  the  field,  and  while  a 
pitiless  rain  beat  in  the  upturned  faces  of  the  slain,  the  Em- 
peror sat  in  his  tent  in  the  brickyard  close  to  the  monument, 
facing  the  fact  that  Germany  was  lost  to  him.  At  his  order, 
the  bells  of  Leipsic  had  rung  for  his  victory,  but  that  was  as 
sounding  brass.  His  German  allies,  caught  in  the  tide  of  na- 
tionality, had  been  falling  away  from  him  day  by  day.  The 
Westphalians  and  the  Saxons  had  been  going  over  to  the  other 


THE  BATTLE  OF  THE  NATIONS  379 

side  for  weeks.  Now  the  Bavarians  had  heard  the  call  of  the 
fatherland  and  joined  the  army  of  liberation. 

Well  might  the  baffled  warrior  in  the  brickyard  cry  out  in 
bitter  despair:  "Ah!  give  me  back  the  old  soldiers  of 
Italy!"  He  might  better  still  have  cried  out  for  the  lost 
soul  of  that  victorious  army  and  its  conquering  watchwords: 
* '  Liberty  !     Equality  !     Fraternity  ! ' ' 

The  next  day  was  Sunday  and  as  dismal  as  his  fortunes. 
"While  the  allied  sovereigns  were  bringing  up  huge  reinforce- 
ments and  combining  to  overwhelm  him,  he  had  no  reserves  to 
call  on.  He  could  only  draw  in  his  wet,  hungry,  and  dis- 
pirited troops  closer  to  the  walls  of  Leipsic  in  preparation  for 
one  more  throw  of  the  dice. 

Monday  dawned  in  a  sombre  mood,  but  soon  a  brilliant  sun 
burst  upon  the  field  where  the  races  and  nations  of  Europe 
were  gathered  to  wrest  from  the  hands  of  Napoleon  the 
sceptre  of  empire.  Even  Asia  had  been  drawn  into  the  strife, 
for  the  Bashkirs  of  Siberia  were  there  with  their  bows  and 
arrows.  From  the  Hill  of  the  Monarchs,  the  Czar,  the  Aus- 
trian Emperor  and  the  Prussian  King  sent  forward  an  army 
of  300,000.  Formed  like  an  enormous  pair  of  open  shears, 
they  closed  in  upon  the  150,000  troops  who  upheld  the  eagles 
of  France  in  lines  that  fell  away  from  the  hill  of  the  monu- 
ment, where  Napoleon  alternately  sat  and  stood  beside  a  ruined 
windmill. 

All  day  a  storm  of  steel  and  lead  beat  against  his  lines  in  the 
struggle  to  hurl  his  army  back  into  the  narrow,  tangled  streets 
of  Leipsic.  He  breasted  the  furious  onslaught  of  the  300,000 
until  night  came  and  until  nearly  all  his  cannon  balls  were 
gone.  His  artillery  had  fired  no  less  than  220,000  rounds  in 
two  days. 

As  darkness  stole  over  the  field,  he  fell  asleep  on  his  camp 
stool  in  the  awful  silence  that  succeeded  the  fury  of  battle. 
While  his  generals  stood  by  awaiting  his  orders  for  the  in- 
evitable retreat,  a  stray  round  shot  fell  in  his  bivouac  fire  and 
awakened  him.  For  a  moment  he  looked  about  in  drowsy 
bewilderment  and  then  pronounced  the  word  which  once  had 
no  place  in  his  lexicon. 


CHAPTER  XLIV 

AT  BAY 

AGE  44 

WITHOUT  guns  and  without  ammunition,  without 
money  and  without  horses,  without  forts  and  with- 
out men,  Napoleon,  in  the  opening  weeks  of  the  year 
1814,  turned  at  bay  to  face  a  world  in  arms  and  defend  France 
and  his  crown  against  a  mighty  host  of  Germans,  Russians 
and  Austrians  swarming  on  the  banks  of  the  Rhine. 

France  lay  bleeding,  exhausted  and  despondent.  For 
twenty-two  years  she  had  been  giving  her  sons  to  war  and 
grieving  over  her  unreturning  brave,  sunk  to  rest  unknelled 
and  uncoffined  beneath  the  palm  and  the  pine,  until  their  un- 
buried  bones  half  encircled  the  earth,  from  the  swamps  of 
Santo  Domingo  to  the  mountains  of  Galilee,  from  the  salt 
mounds  of  Cadiz  to  the  melancholy  wastes  of  Russia.  Year 
after  year  she  had  gathered  her  martial  brood  and  hurled 
army  after  army  at  the  walls  of  her  foes.  Now,  when  her 
own  gates  were  assailed,  they  were  without  defenders. 

The  Emperor  called  upon  the  nation  to  rise  and  repel  the 
invader  from  the  frontier,  which  no  foe  had  passed  in  the 
twenty  years  since  he  trained  his  cannon  on  the  British  in 
the  harbour  of  Toulon.  The  France,  however,  that  had  risen 
in  her  wonderful  strength  the  last  time  a  German  had  dared 
cross  the  Rhine  was  the  France  of  the  Revolution,  which  Na- 
poleon himself  had  slain  on  the  steps  of  St.  Roch  and  in  the 
Orangery  at  St.  Cloud.  "We  must  pull  on  the  boots  of  1793," 
he  cried.  But  the  spirit  of  '93  was  dead  and  even  he  could 
not  call  it  back. 

The  nation  had  been  reduced  to  one  man  and  he  alone  re- 
mained to  face  allied  Europe.     How  he  was  overwhelmed,  it  is 

382 


AT  BAY  383 

easy  enough  to  imagine.  How  he  breasted  the  tide  week  after 
week  and  beat  it  back  time  and  again  ever  remains  an  amazing 
chapter  in  history. 

With  the  armies  of  thirty  nations  at  his  frontier  and  a 
British  army  under  Wellington  actually  on  the  soil  of  south- 
ern France,  he  found  his  treasury,  his  arsenals  and  his  bar- 
racks empty.  All  the  hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars  which 
he  had  collected  in  tribute  from  conquered  states  were  swal- 
lowed up  in  the  disasters  in  Spain,  Russia  and  Germany.  For 
he  had  supported  his  armies  almost  entirely  from  levies  on 
other  countries. 

Yet  he  had  not  spent  quite  all  he  had  taken  in.  In  the 
splendour  of  imperial  power,  he  never  lost  the  homely 
virtue  of  thrift,  and  every  year  he  laid  by  against  a  rainy 
day  nearly  $3,000,000.  Those  savings  from  the  annual  ap- 
propriation he  hoarded  under  the  Tuileries,  and  now  that  the 
rainy  day  had  come,  he  went  down  into  the  cellar  and  took 
the  money  for  his  campaign. 

Alas !  He  had  not  saved  any  of  the  human  millions  whom 
the  people  had  intrusted  to  him.  Had  he  been  as  parsimoni- 
ous with  blood  as  with  gold  it  w^ould  have  served  him  in  good 
stead  now.  Almost  all  the  arm-bearing  population  had  been 
spent,  however,  and  for  five  years  he  had  been  running  into 
debt  and  drawing  the  conscripts  to  his  colours  a  year  and  two 
years  before  the  appointed  time.  He  had  been  so  improvi- 
dent as  not  to  leave  enough  of  the  human  crop  for  seed.  For 
two  decades  the  most  stalwart  candidates  for  paternity  had 
been  carried  off  to  die  in  the  wars  or  drag  themselves  home 
physical  and  moral  wrecks. 

Hard  as  it  was  to  gather  even  a  few  thousand  men  and 
boys  of  all  ages  and  all  sizes,  it  was  harder  still  to  find  horses 
for  them  to  ride  and  good  muskets  to  put  in  their  untrained 
hands. 

There  were  virtually  no  forts,  for  Napoleon  had  been  the 
destroyer  not  the  builder  of  citadels,  which  he  had  captured 
only  to  dismantle.  He  had  conquered  Europe  in  open  fields 
and  generally  had  disdained  even  to  throw  up  breastworks. 
His  only  castle  had  been  his  bayonets  and  his  batteries,  while 


384     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

his  frontier  had  been  as  far  from  the  boundaries  of  France  as 
the  Vistula  and  the  Tiber. 

Now,  however,  he  no  longer  held  anything  beyond  the 
Pyrenees,  the  Alps  and  the  Rhine.  Spain  and  Germany  had 
driven  him  out.  The  Austrians  had  invaded  Italy  and  were 
hastily  snatching  from  him  the  first  of  his  fruits  of  victory, 
while  hemming  in  his  viceroy  at  Milan.  At  the  same  time 
Murat's  childish  and  futile  perfidy  was  fast  losing  the  rest  of 
the  Italian  peninsula.  Vainly  striving,  by  allaying  himself 
with  the  enemy,  to  save  his  royal  house  of  cards  from  the 
impending  crash,  the  King  of  Naples  seized  Rome  and  marched 
northward,  and  Napoleon,  who  had  counted  on  having  the 
French  soldiers  in  Italy  join  him  in  defence  of  France,  had 
to  march  them  against  his  foolish  and  ungrateful  brother-in- 
law. 

Still  another  blow  was  dealt  the  Emperor  in  his  extremity 
by  the  hand  of  another  of  his  old  marshals,  when  Bernadotte 
took  from  him  the  last  of  his  allies.  The  Crown  Prince  of 
Sweden,  forehanded  in  picking  up  the  wreckage,  moved  upon 
Denmark,  which  was  compelled  to  renounce  its  alliance  with 
France  and  cede  Norway  to  Sweden,  and  Heligoland  to  Eng- 
land. 

The  ill-wind  that  was  driving  the  Empire  on  the  rocks,  how- 
ever, blew  open  the  prison  door  of  Pope  Pius  VII.  Napoleon 
no  sooner  saw  Rome  in  the  hands  of  Murat  than  he  started 
the  prisoner  of  Fontainebleau  on  his  homeward  journey  to  the 
Eternal  City,  that  he  "might  burst  on  that  place  like  a  clap 
of  thunder."  Another  prisoner  also  profited  by  the  misfor- 
tunes of  the  Empire,  Ferdinand  being  liberated  from  his  cap- 
tivity of  nearly  six  years  to  return  to  Spain  and  claim  his 
crown.  Thus  Napoleon  threw  over  the  ballast  from  his  sink- 
ing ship,  but  too  late  to  keep  it  afloat.  * 

The  Allies  concentrated  behind  the  Rhine  in  early  Decem- 
ber for  an  immediate  invasion  of  France.  They  had  a  grand 
total  of  880,000  troops  but  they  did  not  choose  to  wait  to  as- 
semble those  great  masses.  They  chose  instead  to  open  a  win- 
ter campaign  with  300,000  men,  while  the  Emperor  yet  had 
no  more  than  50,000  troops  at  the  French  border. 


AT  BAY  385 

"With  the  exception  of  Switzerland  there  were  then  no  neu- 
tral, buffer  states  between  Germany  and  France.  Holland 
and  Belgium  had  been  swallowed  up  in  the  Empire,  whose 
frontier  included  not  only  everything  on  the  left  bank  of  the 
Rhine  but  also  ran  beyond  the  Elbe. 

Billow  entered  Holland,  where  the  Dutch  people  rose  to 
welcome  him,  while  Bliicher  came  down  the  Moselle,  and  ad- 
vanced through  Lorraine,  driving  Victor  from  Nancy  and 
easily  capturing  Toul.  The  main  army,  under  Schwarzen- 
berg,  and  accompanied  by  the  Czar,  the  Emperor  of  Austria 
and  the  King  of  Prussia,  did  not  scruple  to  ignore  Swiss  neu- 
trality. Crossing  the  Rhine  between  Basle  and  Schaffhau- 
sen,  its  advance,  in  overwhelming  numbers,  was  a  military 
promenade.  The  French  helplessly  fell  back  from  town  to 
town  and  from  river  to  river,  while  the  invading  forces  swept 
forward  until  they  stood  at  the  borders  of  Burgundy  and 
Champagne,  where  they  looked  down  the  valleys  of  the  Seine 
and  the  Marne  toward  Paris. 

Thus  the  Cossacks  were  in  the  heart  of  eastern  France  be- 
fore Napoleon  could  piece  together  the  semblance  of  an  army 
of  defence.  He  did  not  leave  Paris,  indeed,  until  nearly  a 
month  had  passed  since  the  Allies  first  crossed  his  frontier. 

Realising  the  desperate  chances  of  his  situation,  he  again  in- 
vested Marie  Louise  with  the  regency,  and  chose  Joseph  Bona- 
parte, the  dethroned  King  of  Spain,  as  her  chief  adviser. 
Assembling  the  officers  of  the  national  guard,  in  the  great  hall 
where  he  had  seen  Louis  XVI  compelled  to  put  on  the  red 
cap  of  liberty  nearly  twenty-two  years  before,  he  held  his 
last  levee  wath  the  Empress. 

The  courtiers  all  came,  hiding  their  fears  behind  their 
smiles,  or  their  treacheries  behind  their  fawning.  When  the 
Emperor  entered,  the  Empress  was  with  him,  and  between 
them  was  the  King  of  Rome,  his  yellow  curls  falling  over  the 
shoulders  of  the  blue  coat  of  his  uniform  of  the  national  guard. 
That  simple  picture  of  father  and  mother  and  son  touched 
the  heart  and  kindled  a  devotion  beyond  any  words  however 
eloquent. 

After  the  three  had  walked  directly  to  the  large  group  of 


386  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

officers,  the  Emperor  said  to  them:  "Gentlemen.  I  am  about 
to  go  to  the  army,  but  I  intrust  to  you  what  I  hold  dearest  in 
the  world — my  wife  and  son.  Let  there  be  no  political  di- 
visions," Lifting  up  his  son,  he  carried  him  among  the 
officers  and  courtiers,  who  cheered  and  wept  while  they 
pledged  their  lives  for  the  protection  of  the  Empress  and  the 
King  of  Rome, 

In  a  few  hours  more  Napoleon  held  his  boy  in  his  arms  and 
looked  into  his  blue  eyes  for  the  last  time.  For  the  last  time, 
too,  he  folded  Marie  Louise  in  his  embrace  as  he  was  depart- 
ing at  three  o'clock  on  a  dreary  January  morning  to  battle 
with  her  father. 

The  drama  of  Napoleon's  life  from  prologue  to  epilogue 
was  highly  theatrical.  It  became  sheer  melodrama  when 
the  curtain  rose  upon  him  standing  at  bay  amid  the  charred 
ruins  of  Brienne,  Driven  from  Cairo  and  Moscow,  Rome  and 
Vienna,  Madrid  and  Berlin,  hunted  out  of  Egypt  and  Syria 
and  Russia,  Spain  and  Austria  and  Poland,  Italy  and  Ger- 
many and  Holland,  chased  from  river  to  river  across  the  face 
of  Europe,  he  took  refuge  in  the  village  of  his  boyhood  days, 
and  from  behind  its  garden  walls  he  turned  upon  the  avenging 
nations.  Russian  Cossacks  and  Prussian  Uhlans,  the  soldiers 
of  all  the  lands  which  his  legions  had  overrun,  were  upon  him 
and  the  village  lanes  resounded  with  the  yells  of  the  eager 
pack. 

Some  Uhlans  almost  rode  him  down  in  a  neighbouring  town 
and  had  nearly  surrounded  him,  when  a  French  brigade  came 
up  just  in  time  to  cut  him  out.  After  they  were  beaten  off, 
he  saw  the  priest  of  the  place,  standing  by  the  roadside.  Rec- 
ognising him  as  one  of  his  teachers  in  the  friars'  school,  he 
exclaimed:  "What!  It  is  you,  my  dear  master!  I  don't 
need  to  ask  if  you  know  this  neighbourhood?" 

The  father  assured  him,  ' '  Sire,  I  could  find  my  way  every- 
where blindfolded."  Roustan  thereupon  was  ordered  to  dis- 
mount and  give  his  horse  to  the  clerical  guide,  who  led  the 
way  toward  Brienne. 

It  was  dusk  when  Napoleon  approached  the  town,  riding 
beside  his  old  teacher.     Bliicher  had  occupied  the  village  and 


AT  BAY  387 

was  eating  his  supper  in  the  big  chateau  when  a  hail  of  shots 
suddenly  descended  and  the  French  cavalry  dashed  up  to 
the  front  gate.  The  old  Prussian  marshal  did  not  stop  to 
finish  his  meal,  and  was  fortunate  to  be  able  to  make  his  escape 
by  a  back  way.  He  rallied  his  forces  out  on  the  snow-covered 
fields  and  blazed  at  the  town  until  midnight,  but  the  schoolboy 
of  Brienne  had  come  into  his  own  and  held  it. 

Seated  in  the  chateau  he  heard  again  the  never  forgotten 
tones  of  the  bell  in  the  old  church  tower  at  the  foot  of  the  hill. 
Once  more  he  slept  in  the  bed  ever  after  cherished  by  the 
counts  of  Brienne,  which  he  had  first  occupied  when  he  came 
ten  years  before  to  let  the  villagers  see  the  crown  the  little 
Corsican  had  won.  That  crown,  beside  which  all  other  crowns 
had  paled  and  before  which  the  nations  had  bowed  in  subjec- 
tion, that  crown  which  millions  of  bayonets  had  guarded,  now 
could  command  no  more  than  100,000  ill-armed,  ill-clad,  ill-fed 
and  ill-trained  defenders  against  the  over-whelming  hosts  of 
the  Romanoffs,  the  Hapsburgs,  and  the  Hohenzollerns,  banded 
together  to  snatch  it  from  his  brow. 

Bliicher  was  determined  to  retake  Brienne,  and  on  the  third 
day  he  returned  to  the  attack.  Napoleon  went  forth  to  meet 
him  about  the  village  of  La  Rothiere,  which  lies  across  the 
prairie  in  view  of  the  old  belfry.  It  was  another  snow  battle, 
for  the  combat  was  waged  in  the  midst  of  a  cold  and  heavy 
snowstorm ;  but  unlike  the  memorable  snow  battle  in  the 
schoolyard,  an  Empire  was  the  prize  at  stake  now. 

And  Napoleon  lost.  After  sacrificing  a  full  tenth  of  his 
little  army,  he  retreated  under  cover  of  darkness  to  another 
night  in  the  chateau.  It  was  a  night  filled  with  alarms.  At 
four  in  the  morning,  he  hurriedly  rode  away  from  Brienne 
forever,  to  fall  back  across  one  more  river  in  a  retreat  which 
really  began  at  Moscow. 

Hastily  crossing  the  Aube,  he  ran  into  Troyes,  that  pic- 
turesque old  town  of  narrow,  winding  streets  and  timbered 
houses.  There,  in  the  ancient  capital  of  Champagne,  he  stood 
by  the  shore  of  the  last  river  at  his  command,  the  Seine,  and 
onl,y  100  miles  from  Paris.  But  in  its  dread  of  the  wounded 
lion,  the  Army  of  the  Sovereigns  halted  behind  the  Aube,     In- 


388  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

stead  of  falling  upon  him  in  crushing  force,  the  Allies  di- 
vided, Bliicher  moving  up  to  the  Marne,  with  the  intention 
of  marching  to  Paris  down  the  valley  of  that  river,  while  the 
main  army  undertook  to  advance  on  the  capital  by  the  valley 
of  the  Seine. 

Meanwhile  the  diplomats  of  the  belligerent  nations  had  as- 
sembled in  a  congress  at  Chatillon  and  raised  the  price  of 
peace.  At  Prague  they  offered  to  let  Napoleon  keep  Belgium, 
Holland,  and  Italy;  at  Frankfurt  they  subtracted  Italy  and 
Holland,  and  now,  at  Chatillon,  they  withdrew  Belgium,  which 
France  had  taken  from  Austria  in  the  Revolution,  before  Na- 
poleon came  to  power.  This  latest  demand  infuriated  him. 
"Unheard-of  disasters  may  have  snatched  from  me  the  prom- 
ise to  renounce  my  own  conquests,"  he  said,  "but  give  up 
those  made  before  me  ?  Never !  God  save  me  from  that  dis- 
grace!" 

England  was  determined,  however,  to  remove  the  entire 
Netherlands  from  the  control  of  a  great  rival  power  like 
France.  For  she  has  ever  regarded  the  coast  of  Holland  and 
Belgium  as  her  landing  place  on  the  continent. 

The  Czar,  implacable  as  the  English,  was  eager  to  enter 
Paris  and  destroy  the  Bonaparte  throne.  The  Austrians,  how- 
ever, having  already  retaken  virtually  everything  he  had  cap- 
tured from  them,  were  less  eager  for  the  pursuit. 

With  allied  Europe  only  five  or  six  marches  from  Paris, 
Napoleon  could  not  bend  his  pride  and  bring  himself  to  accept 
any  bounds  to  his  sovereignty.  Like  a  high-powered  locomo- 
tive descending  from  a  great  height  at  top  speed,  he  could 
not  stop  until  he  was  thrown  and  ditched.  His  fall  must 
equal  his  rise,  his  misfortunes  must  be  in  proportion  to  his 
fortunes. 

Two  days  after  his  arrival  in  Troyes,  the  Emperor  rose  from 
his  maps  and  exclaimed,  "I  am  going  to  beat  Bliicher!" 
Starting  at  once  on  a  swift  cross-country  march,  he  ordered 
the  detachment  remaining  behind  to  maintain  a  noisy  show 
of  aggressiveness  toward  Schwarzenberg,  shout  "Vive  I'Em- 
pereur"  and  make  that  cautious  commander  feel  that  he  still 
had  Napoleon  in  front  of  him. 


AT  BAY  389 

While  both  Schwarzenberg  and  Bliicher  supposed  him  still 
at  Troyes,  while  the  former  was  slowly  manoeuvring  with  ex- 
treme prudence  and  the  latter  was  flattering  himself  he  had 
stolen  a  march  on  the  Great  Captain,  he  fell  like  a  cloudless 
thunderbolt  upon  the  carelessly  strung-out  column  of  Bliicher. 
For  one  swift  week,  the  Emperor  was  again  the  Little  Corporal 
of  Montenotte,  of  Lodi,  of  Castiglione  and  of  Rivoli. 

Catching  up  some  veteran  dragoons  of  the  Spanish  cam- 
paign, who  had  galloped  across  France  "without  unbridling," 
he  drove  them  on  without  giving  them  a  breathing  time.  lie 
marched  his  conscripts  all  night  and  kept  them  fighting  all 
day,  and  like  a  whirlwind  tore  through  wondering  villages, 
where  he  never  before  had  been  seen.  Loading  his  infantry 
into  the  carts  of  the  peasantry,  he  carried  his  little  band  over 
slushy  roads  sixty  miles  in  thirty-six  hours.  His  appearance 
thrilled  alike  the  populace  and  the  troops,  and  we  are  told  that 
under  the  inspiration  of  his  presence  "the  cavalry  attacks 
were  fiercer,"  and  that  even  "the  fire  of  the  cannon  was 
heavier. ' ' 

First  striking  one  of  Bliicher 's  divisions  at  Champaubert, 
only  1500  of  its  5000  men  escaped  him.  Next  he  fought 
what  is  called  the  Battle  of  Montmirail  and  routed  two  other 
divisions.  He  pounced  upon  the  marshal  himself  the  follow- 
ing day  and  hurled  him  from  Chateau  Thierry.  In  four 
whirling  days,  his  30,000  men  smashed  to  pieces  an  army  of 
more  than  50,000  when  its  van  was  within  fifty  or  sixty  miles 
of  Paris.  Bliicher  found  himself  driven  back  in  disorder  to 
Chalons  sur  Marne,  more  than  100  miles  from  his  goal,  and 
with  a  loss  of  nearly  20,000  men. 

Turning  in  a  flash  from  Bliicher,  Napoleon  smote  and 
paralysed  the  left  wing  of  the  Army  of  the  Sovereigns  when 
it  was  only  twelve  miles  or  a  day 's  march  from  Fontainebleau. 
Throwing  himself  upon  it  at  Montereau,  which  snuggles  in  the 
elbow  formed  by  the  Yonne  and  the  Seine,  he  dealt  a  blow 
that  sent  Sehwarzenberg  staggering  back  to  the  Aube. 

In  the  rejuvenation  of  victoiy,  he  became  once  more  the 
young  artilleryman  and  pointed  the  cannon  that  tore  the 
enemy's    front.     The   gunners   protested   against   their    Em- 


390     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

peror  's  exposure  to  peril,  but  he  reassured  them :  '  *  Ah  !  my 
friends,  never  fear;  the  ball  is  not  yet  cast  that  will  kill  me." 

As  he  moved  forward  from  IMontereau,  an  army  that  out- 
numbered his  five  to  two  timidly  retired  before  him  and  he 
declared  to  his  minister  of  war  that  he  would  have  wiped  it  out 
but  for  his  lack  of  twenty  skiffs  with  which  to  cross  the  Seine 
in  pursuit.  "It  was  not  fifty  boats  that  I  needed — only 
twenty ! ' ' 

While  the  Emperor  was  pausing  again  at  Troyes,  he  heard 
that  Bliicher  had  organised  a  new  army  of  50,000  men  for 
a  fresh  start  toward  Paris.  Resolved  to  break  him  up  once 
more,  he  left  the  Seine,  crossed  the  Marne  and  the  Aisne,  and 
fell  upon  the  old  hussar  at  Craone,  a  crow  flight  of  eighty 
miles  north  of  Troyes.  The  fortress  of  Soissons,  however, 
had  fallen,  and  Bliicher,  having  been  joined  by  Billow's  army 
from  Holland,  had  in  hand  no  less  than  110,000  men  against 
45,000  French.  In  vain  the  Emperor  flung  himself  against 
that  wall  of  steel  and  then  turned  back  to  open  a  new  cam- 
paign of  intimidation  against  Schwarzenberg. 

When  he  thought  that  commander  was  retiring  before  him, 
as  usual,  the  Army  of  the  Sovereigns  turned  upon  him  at 
Arcis  sur  Aube,  where  with  only  20,000  men  he  was  sur- 
rounded by  80,000  and  had  no  other  means  of  escape  than  by 
a  narrow  bridge.  Yet  for  two  hours  those  80,000  stood  silent, 
motionless,  and  irresolute  on  the  heights  of  the  Aube  before 
the  mere  handful  on  the  river  bank.  The  Emperor  was  lucky 
in  the  end  to  get  away  with  no  greater  loss  than  5000  men ; 
but  that  was  one-fourth  of  his  strength. 

Both  Bliicher  and  Schwarzenberg  having  beaten  him  off,  he 
saw  in  his  hand  but  one  more  card  to  play.  If  he  could  no 
longer  block  the  road  to  Paris,  he  would  try  to  cut  in  behind 
the  invaders,  arouse  the  population  of  Alsace  and  Lorraine 
and  bring  the  Allies  back  to  defend  their  lines  of  communica- 
tion. With  only  10,000  men,  he  started  for  the  Rhine,  but  he 
declared  "soon  I  shall  have  100,000." 

As  he  sped  eastward,  however,  and  Schwarzenberg  was 
turning  to  pursue  him,  two  couriers  were  captured  by  the 
Cossacks  and   two  letters  taken   from  them.     By   that  mis- 


J 


AT  BAY  391 

chance  of  the  road,  the  ruse  was  exposed.  One  letter  was 
from  Savary  to  the  Emperor  telling  him  that  France  could 
no  longer  resist  and  the  other  was  from  the  Emperor  to  Marie 
Louise,  divulging  his  purpose  to  draw  the  Allies  away  from 
Paris.  With  those  tell-tale  letters  in  his  hands,  the  Czar  in- 
sisted that  Schwarzenberg  and  Bliicher  should  at  once  join 
forces  in  an  advance  on  the  capital,  and  only  a  small  force  was 
sent  to  the  rear  to  delude  Napoleon  with  the  idea  that  the 
Allies  were  following  him. 

After  the  Emperor  had  fenced  for  two  or  three  days  with 
the  decoy  division,  some  bulletins  of  the  Allies  were  found  in 
the  pockets  of  captured  soldiers,  which  announced  that  the 
allied  army  was  paying  no  attention  to  him,  but  was  making 
straight  for  Paris.  Then  the  true  situation  dawned  upon  his 
understanding. 

He  was  at  St.  Dizier  when  the  scales  fell  from  his  eyes  and 
he  saw  the  peril  of  his  capital,  150  miles  away.  He  turned 
at  once  to  run  a  race  across  France  in  an  effort  to  get  ahead 
of  the  invaders  and,  sword  in  hand,  take  his  place  at  the  city 
gate. 


CHAPTER  XLV 
THE  FIRST  ABDICATION 

1814      AGE   44 

NAPOLEON  was  yet  100  miles  away  and  furiously  gal- 
loping through  Champagne  when,  on  the  29th  of 
March,  1814,  the  Allies,  the  first  alien  invaders  in 
350  years  to  come  in  sight  of  the  capital  of  France,  saw  from 
Clichy  the  setting  sun  gild  the  spires  of  Paris. 

From  a  tower  of  Notre  Dame,  the  Parisians  could  see  the 
Kussians  and  Germans  and  Austrians  rolling  toward  their 
walls  like  a  tidal  wave,  and  could  see  the  smoke  curling  above 
the  camp  fires  of  the  enemy.  The  French  had  conquered  the 
capitals  of  Europe,  but  at  last  retribution  awaited  them  at  the 
gates  of  their  own  capital,  where  the  eager  Cossacks  echoed 
the  cry  of  a  hetman:  "Ah,  Father  Paris!  Thou  shalt  now 
pay  for  Mother  Moscow!" 

The  beautiful  capital  was  adorned  with  the  treasures  of 
conquered  lands  and  the  monuments  of  military  triumph.  No 
less  than  1200  melted  cannon,  which  Napoleon  had  captured 
from  Russia  and  Austria,  were  in  the  lofty  Vendome  column. 
But  there  were  no  guns  to  mount  on  the  city  wall.  Paris, 
like  all  France,  was  exhausted  by  victory  and  bankrupted  by 
glory. 

Already  Marie  Louise  and  her  three-year-old  son  had  left 
the  Tuileries.  The  Emperor  had  repeatedly  commanded  that 
his  wife  and  boy  should  leave  before  the  city  fell.  ''I  would 
rather  my  son  should  have  his  throat  cut  than  that  he  should 
be  brought  up  in  Vienna  as  an  Austrian  prince,"  he  wrote 
King  Joseph.  As  for  himself,  he  plainly  warned  his  brother 
that  when  Paris  fell  he  would  have  ceased  to  live. 

^.Yhen  the  batteries  of  the  Allies  began  to  knock  at 
the  gates  on  the  30th  of  March,  there  were  only  seven  old 

392 


i 


THE  FIRST  ABDICATION  393 

cannon  with  whicli  to  hold  those  natural  defences  of  the 
city,  the  heights  of  Montmartre.  Marshals  Marmont,  Mor- 
tier  and  Moncey  gathered  a  few  defenders,  some  of  them 
only  high  school  boys,  and  offered  a  gallant  but  vain  show  of 
resistance.  At  four  in  the  afternoon  the  struggle  was  over 
and  a  trumpeter  rode  out  with  a  flag  of  truce.  By  the  gate 
of  La  Villette,  not  far  from  the  Gare  du  Nord  to-day,  a 
parley  was  held  as  the  sun  was  sinking  behind  IMontmartre, 
and  it  was  agreed  that  the  little  army  of  defence  should 
evacuate  the  city  in  the  night  and  that  the  Allies  should  make 
their  entry  in  the  morning. 

For  three  days  Napoleon  had  been  racing  back  from  St. 
Dizier.  Leaving  his  exhausted  soldiers  behind  him  on  the 
third  day,  he  jumped  into  a  light  wicker  carriage  with  Caulain- 
court,  while  Drouot  and  Flahault,  Gourgaud  and  Lefebre  fol- 
lowed in  similar  conveyances.  At  Sens  he  heard  that  the 
enemy  was  before  Paris;  at  Fontainebleau  that  the  Empress 
and  the  King  of  Rome  had  left  the  city ;  at  Essonnes  that  the 
battle  was  on — and  he  still  twenty  miles  away ! 

It  was  ten  o'clock  at  night  when  he  dashed  into  the  village 
of  Cour  de  France  and  stopped  for  his  last  change  of  horses. 
That  Gethsemane  of  the  Empire  no  longer  is  Cour  de  France, 
but  is  now  called  Fromanteau.  In  all  else,  however,  with  its 
stone  cottages  bordering  the  high  road  between  Paris  and 
Fontainebleau,  it  is  much  the  same  simple  hamlet  that  it  was 
in  the  days  when  the  Emperor  and  his  court,  in  a  cloud  of 
dust,  passed  through  on  their  imperial  progresses  between  the 
capital  and  the  great  chateau,  and  as  it  was  that  night  of 
the  30th  of  March,  1814,  when,  in  an  agony  of  rage  and 
despair,  he  paced  its  only  street. 

At  the  southern  entrance  of  the  village  there  rise  by  the 
road  two  time-scarred  fountains,  the  fountains  of  Juvisy,  as 
they  are  called  in  honour  of  the  municipality  of  which  Cour  de 
France  is  but  a  small  part.  The  women  and  children  of  the 
neighbourhood,  who  still  come  to  hold  their  buckets  and  pitch- 
ers under  the  flowing  streams,  are  reminded  by  the  inscrip- 
tions that  they  are  indebted  for  the  refreshing  bounty  of  the 
fountains  to  King  Louis  XV,   and   for  their  restoration  to 


394  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"Napoleon  le  Grand."  It  was  the  irony  of  fortune  that  by 
those  fountains  of  Juvis}^,  "Napoleon  le  Grand"  should  have 
received  the  bitterest  draft  that  until  then  ever  had  been 
pressed  to  his  lips. 

While  the  impatient  Emperor  waited  there  for  fresh  horses 
to  speed  him  on  the  last  stage  of  his  race  for  empire,  a  cavalry 
command  came  toward  him  from  Paris.  ' '  What !  you,  Bel- 
liard!"  he  exclaimed  as  he  recognised  that  general.  "What 
does  this  mean?  You  here  with  your  cavalry?  Where  is  the 
army  ? ' '  The  general  detailed  to  the  Emperor  the  dire  events 
of  that  fateful  day  when  Paris  and  the  Empire  fell. 

The  Allies  were  not  to  enter  the  city  until  the  morning? 
The  Emperor  knit  his  brow.  He  could  be  in  Paris  in  an 
hour !  * '  There  is  still  time ! "  he  cried  to  Caulaincourt.  ' '  My 
carriage !  You  hear  what  I  say  ?  I  mean  to  go  to  Paris !  My 
carriage  !     Bring  me  my  carriage  ! ' ' 

More  retreating  troops  came,  bringing  the  same  despairing 
story  to  the  Emperor  where  he  sat  on  the  base  of  one  of  the 
fountains,  supporting  his  throbbing  head  in  his  hands.  Soon 
he  started  up  from  his  roadside  revery  and  strode  through  the 
village  and  to  the  brow  of  the  hill.  Standing  there,  he  saw  the 
bivouac  fires  of  allied  Europe  drawn  in  a  cordon  about  the 
surrendered  city.  Caulaincourt  inducing  him  to  turn  his  back 
on  the  painful  spectacle,  he  retired  to  the  Inn  of  Cour  de 
France. 

That  humble  wayside  tavern  is  gone  now,  and  on  its  site 
are  the  villa  and  astronomical  observatory  of  Camille  Flam- 
marion,  whose  most  powerful  lens,  however,  cannot  catch  a 
gleam  of  the  star  which  Napoleon  saw  leading  him  on  to 
glory  and  to  disaster. 

No  sooner  had  the  Emperor  entered  the  inn  than  he  spread 
his  maps  and  fell  into  a  soliloquy:  "Alexander  will  hold  a 
review  to-morrow;  he  will  have  half  his  army  on  the  right 
bank  of  the  Seine  and  the  other  half  on  the  left.  If  I  only 
had  my  army,  I  could  crush  them  all." 

Again  he  looked  up,  with  a  new  hope  flaming  in  his  eye. 
"I've  got  them!     I've  got  them!"  he  shouted.     "God  has 


THE  FIRST  ABDICATION  395 

placed  them  in  my  hands ! ' '  He  would  go  to  Fontainebleau, 
assemble  his  army  and  drive  the  aliens  out  of  his  capital. 

Caulaincourt  begged  him  to  accept  the  terms  offered  by  the 
congress  of  Chatillon,  but  which,  of  course,  were  no  longer 
open  to  him.  Still  he  would  not  consider  the  suggestion  of 
his  minister.  Although  he  started  him  to  Paris  with  instruc- 
tions to  negotiate  with  the  allied  sovereigns,  he  warned  him, 
"No  shameful  peace!"  Even  with  Paris  fallen,  he  would  not 
give  up  Antwerp !  ' '  France  would  be  nothing  without 
Antwerp  ! "  he  persisted. 

When  Caulaincourt  had  departed  on  his  futile  mission,  the 
maps  were  rolled  up,  and  the  Emperor,  worn  out  by  his  three- 
day  race  against  fate,  fell  asleep  in  the  tavern  chair.  It  was 
nature's  truce.  Oblivious  to  his  misfortunes  he  sat  there  un- 
til four  o'clock  in  the  morning,  when  he  re-entered  his  wicker 
carriage  and  drove  back  to  Fontainebleau. 

At  eleven  o'clock  that  morning,  a  troop  of  Cossacks,  fol- 
lowed by  the  Czar  and  the  King  of  Prussia,  passed  under  the 
arch  of  Louis  XIV  at  the  Porte  St.  Martin  in  Paris.  As  the 
victorious  spearmen  from  the  Don  and  the  conquering  mon- 
archs  pranced  along  the  boulevards,  welcoming  cheers  rang 
from  the  crowded  windows  and  roofs.  "Long  live  the  Czar !" 
"Long  live  the  King  of  Prussia!"  "Long  live  our  liberators!" 
"Long  live  King  Louis  XVIII !"     "Do^ra  with  the  tyrant !" 

All  the  better  dressed  people  had  brought  out  and  donned 
the  white  cockade,  and  the  lilies  of  the  Bourbons  fell  like  snow- 
flakes  in  the  pathway  of  the  conquerors.  Paris  had  ex- 
hausted her  passion  in  the  Reign  of  Terror,  and  her  popula- 
tion as  a  whole  had  been  indifferent  lookers-on  at  the  rise 
and  fall  of  each  successive  regime.  She  only  shrugged  her 
shoulders  and  smiled  as  a  mere  claque  acclaimed  the  Empire, 
the  marriage  of  Marie  Louise  and  the  birth  of  the  King  of 
Rome,  Now  the  downfall  of  the  Emperor  was  applauded  by 
but  a  mere  claque  of  time  servers  and  Bourbon  nobles.  That 
rejoicing  faction  was  under  the  leadership  of  Talleyrand,  the 
bishop  who  had  blessed  the  pikes  of  the  Revolution,  who  be- 
came a  prince  of  the  Empire,  and  who  was  now  waiting  in 


396  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  doorway  of  the  great  palace  which  Napoleon  gave  him  to 
offer  its  hospitality  to  the  Czar.  By  his  side  stood  Bour- 
rienne,  his  lips  puckered  to  kiss  the  hand  that  had  overturned 
the  Empire  of  the  old  schoolmate  of  Brienne,  of  the  man  who 
had  kept  him  on  his  payroll  as  minister  at  Hamburg  even 
after  he  had  betrayed  his  confidence  in  the  post  of  private 
secretary. 

The  compliant  senate  as  readily  voted  the  dethronement  of 
its  former  master  as  it  had  registered  his  every  will  for  ten 
years.  Even  the  marshals,  anxious  to  save  their  batons  and 
their  ducal  palaces  and  estates,  hastened  to  change  their  al- 
legiance and  pledge  their  swords  to  the  new  rule.  "Away 
with  Bonaparte ! ' '  was  the  watchword  now,  and  thus  in  a  day 
the  reign  of  Napoleon  vanished  like  a  dream. 

While  the  Parisians  were  cheering  their  conquerors  and 
supple  courtiers  were  administering  on  his  estate,  Napoleon 
was  sitting  in  the  deepening  gloom  that  hour  by  hour  gathered 
about  him  in  the  old  chateau  of  Fontainebleau,  whose  shadows 
to-day,  crowded  though  they  are  with  the  spirits  of  the  scep- 
tred dead,  still  are  ruled  by  his  stubborn,  unlaid  ghost.  It 
rises  before  the  visitor  as  he  enters  the  palace  gate.  He 
sees  it  walking  down  the  Horseshoe  Stairs  on  the  way  to  the 
Elban  exile  and  pausing  to  bestow  a  parting  kiss  on  the  im- 
perial eagle.  He  hears  the  echoed  accents  of  the  eloquent 
farewell  to  the  Old  Guard,  which  have  been  treasured  these 
hundred  years  by  the  grey  walls  of  the  Court  of  the  White 
Horse,  or  the  Court  of  the  Adieu,  as  it  is  sentimentally  called. 

As  the  pilgrim  passes  into  the  chateau  itself,  he  is  led  first 
of  all  up  a  flight  of  stairs  and  through  the  haunted  apart- 
ments of  Napoleon  in  a  corner  of  the  vast  pile,  where,  like  a 
tenant  in  a  second  story  flat,  the  Emperor  occupied  only  a 
half-dozen  rooms  in  a  row.  The  one  other  suite  in  this  wing 
of  the  chateau  faces  the  opposite  direction  and  looks  across 
the  long  corridor  of  Francis  I,  and  out  upon  the  Court  of 
the  Fountains. 

It  was  in  that  row  of  rooms,  just  on  the  other  side  of  the 
wall  from  his  own,  that  Napoleon  imprisoned  the  Pope  of 
Rome.     And  Pius  VII  had  been  liberated  less  than  ten  weeks, 


THE  FIRST  ABDICATION  397 

when  the  captor  himself  was  virtually  a  captive  in  the  ad- 
joining suite.  Could  punishment  more  closely  tread  upon 
the  heels  of  an  offence,  even  within  the  jurisdiction  of  poetic 
justice  ? 

Ney,  ]\Iacdonald  and  Oudinot,  Berthier,  Marmont  and  Lefebre 
were  at  Fontainebleau,  anxiously  waiting  for  their  release  and 
an  opportunity  to  make  terms  with  the  new  regime.  At  last, 
Ney,  the  outspoken  hussar,  burst  in  upon  the  Emperor  and 
boldly  proclaimed  their  mutiny.  "Sire,"  the  marshal  Prince 
of  the  Mosla^a,  bluntly  announced,  "it  is  time  to  stop !  You 
are  in  the  position  of  a  man  on  his  deathbed.  You  must 
make  your  will  and  abdicate  in  favour  of  the  King  of  Rome." 

j\Iust !  Never  in  the  eighteen  years  since  he  took  command 
of  the  Arm}'-  of  Italy  had  Napoleon  heard  that  word  from 
the  lips  of  any  man.  In  his  astonishment,  he  appealed  to  his 
other  princes  and  dukes.  Their  answer  was  made  with 
Scotch  candour  by  ^larshal  ]\Iacdonald,  "We  have  had  enough 
of  war  without  kindling  a  civil  war." 

The  Emperor  could  not  fail  to  see  that  he  was  helpless  in 
the  midst  of  a  palace  revolution.  In  his  bewilderment,  he  re- 
treated from  the  scene,  but  only  to  surrender  after  a  painful 
wrestle  with  his  tumultuous  impulses.  Seated  at  the  table 
which  still  stands  in  the  salon  of  his  suite,  he  scrawled  a  con- 
ditional abdication  and  sent  Caulaincourt,  Ney  and  Macdonald 
to  Paris,  charged  with  the  duty  of  securing  the  crown  to  the 
King  of  Rome.  That  night,  however,  Marshal  Marmont  w^ent 
over  to  the  Allies,  carrying  his  12,000  soldiers  with  him,  al- 
though the  men  rebelled  and  cursed  their  officers  when,  too 
late,  they  found  they  had  been  led  into  the  camp  of  the  for- 
eign invaders.  This  was  the  crudest  of  all  the  blows  which  ad- 
versity was  raining  upon  Napoleon's  head.  The  desertion 
advertised  his  weakness  among  his  marshals  and  emboldened 
the  Allies,  who  no  longer  hesitated  in  their  purpose  to  ex- 
terminate the  Bonaparte  dynasty  and  restore  the  Bourbons. 

Bowing  to  the  inevitable,  at  last,  Napoleon  seated  himself 
once  more  at  the  little  round-top  mahogany  table  by  the 
window,  looking  out  upon  the  springtime  bloom  in  the  garden 
of  Diana,  and  scratched  his  second  and  unconditional  abdi- 


398     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

cation.  After  he  had  written  it,  he  inserted  the  words,  "for 
himself  and  for  his  heirs."  With  those  half  dozen  words 
added,  he  had  signed  away  not  only  his  Empire,  but  also  the 
birthright  of  his  boy,  whom  only  three  years  before  he  had 
hailed  with  joy  as  the  inheritor  and  perpetuator  of  his  lord- 
ship of  the  earth. 

The  King  was  dead  in  a  living  death !  Long  live  the 
King! 

One  by  one  the  princes,  the  dukes,  the  courtiers,  and  even 
the  servants  softly  tiptoed  out  of  the  chateau  and  ran  breath- 
lessly into  Paris  to  salute  the  rising  sun.  Ney  did  not  return 
to  say  farewell  to  his  old  commander.  Berthier  excused  him- 
self for  a  brief  absence.  ''He  won't  come  back;  I  tell  you. 
He  won't  come  back,"  the  Emperor  predicted,  and  truly. 
For  he  never  again  saw  his  chief  of  staff  and  his  tent  mate  in 
all  his  campaigns.     Savary  refused  to  come  at  all. 

Roustan,  who  ever  since  he  entered  Napoleon's  service  at 
the  Gate  of  Victory  in  Cairo,  had  slept,  poniard  in  hand,  at 
his  chamber  door,  went  to  fetch  his  wife  and  children  that 
they  might  help  him  share  his  master's  exile,  and  the  Emperor 
gave  him  $5000 ;  but  the  mameluke  never  returned.  Nor  did 
the  valet  Constant,  his  pockets  bulging  with  the  Emperor's 
gold,  reappear  after  leaving  to  visit  his  family. 

At  last  the  companions  of  his  glory  and  the  partakers  of  his 
bounty  all  were  gone  and  he  was  left  alone  in  his  gloom.  The 
Allies  had  drawn  their  barrier  of  alien  bayonets  between  him 
and  his  wife  and  son,  and  cut  him  off  from  his  mother  and 
his  brothers. 

Abandoned  and  solitary  he  received  his  sentence  of  ban- 
ishment to  Elba.  His  spirit  gave  way  under  the  burdens  that 
pitiless  fate  was  heaping  upon  it,  and  he  turned  to  the  old, 
familiar  companion  of  his  melancholy  moods.  This  dark- 
visaged  mate  had  walked  with  him  in  his  unhappy  youth  on 
the  banks  of  the  Rhone  and  the  Seine.  They  had  tramped 
together  the  snows  of  Russia,  when  in  the  retreat  from  Moscow 
he  had  armed  himself  with  Frederick  the  Great's  favourite 
weapon  against  misfortune  and  carried  in  his  pocket  a  little 
bottle  as  the  sure  means  of  escape  from  the  humiliation  of 


THE  FIRST  ABDICATION  399 

capture.  Moreover,  had  he  not  warned  King  Joseph  in  Feb- 
ruary that  he  would  die  ii'  Paris  fell  ? 

Even  this  friend  proved  faithless  and  refused  to  do  his  bid- 
ding. His  violent  sickness,  after  taking  the  drug,  aroused 
his  attendants,  and,  though  he  begged  his  physician  for  an- 
other and  more  efficacious  poison,  he  was  saved  from  suicide. 
"Every  one,  everything  has'  betrayed  me,"  he  grieved. 
"Fate  has  decided;  I  am  condemned  to  live!" 

The  Allies,  after  considering  Corfu,  Corsica  and  Elba,  had 
chosen  the  latter  island  as  the  place  of  exile.  They  presented 
to  Napoleon  a  formal  treaty — the  Treaty  of  Fontainebleau — 
which  ceded  to  him  its  few  square  miles  and  recognised  him 
as  Emperor  of  the  tiny  realm.  By  this  same  instrument,  the 
near-by  Italian  duchies  of  Parma,  Placentia  and  Guastalla 
were  bestowed  upon  j\Iarie  Louise,  who  was  still  to  wear  the 
title  of  Empress,  while  the  King  of  Rome  was  to  be  the  Duke 
of  Parma. 

After  Napoleon  had  been  three  weeks  at  Fontainebleau,  the 
morning  came  for  his  departure.  Four  commissioners  of  the 
Allies,  an  Austrian  general,  an  English  colonel,  a  Prussian 
count  and  a  Russian  general,  had  arrived  at  the  chateau  to 
see  that  the  treaty  with  the  new  sovereign  of  Elba  was  ful- 
filled. 

The  Old  Guard  were  drawn  up  in  the  Court  of  the  "White 
Horse  for  their  last  review  when  the  Emperor  descended  the 
Horseshoe  Stair.  Standing  by  his  carriage  door,  he  bade 
them  farewell  in  clear,  ringing  tones,  concluding  with  these 
words : 

Be  always  faithful  in  the  path  of  duty  and  honour.  Serve  with 
fidelity  your  new  sovereign.  The  sweetest  occupation  of  my  life 
henceforth  will  be  to  make  known  to  posterity  all  that  you  have 
done,  and  my  only  consolation  will  be  to  learn  all  that  France  may 
do  for  the  glory  of  her  name. 

You  are  all  my  children.  I  cannot  embrace  you  all,  but  I  will 
embrace  you  in  the  person  of  your  general. 

After  he  had  folded  the  general  in  his  arms  and  kissed  him 
on  either  cheek,  the  standard  of  the  Guard,  surmounted  by 


400    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

an  eagle,  was  brought  to  him,  and  for  half  a  minute  he  held 
it  to  his  breast.  Then,  lifting  his  hand,  he  said  to  his  sobbing 
veterans,  ' '  Adieu !     Keep  me  in  your  remembrance. ' ' 

The  tortures  he  had  endured  at  Fontainebleau,  where  his 
marshals  and  followers  abandoned  him,  were  inflicted  anew 
along  the  route  of  his  journey,  where  the  people  came  out  only 
to  heap  curses  upon  him.  And  this  on  the  very  road  where, 
on  his  return  from  Egypt  less  than  fifteen  years  before,  he 
had  been  hailed  with  joyful  acclamations  as  the  liberator  and 
deliverer  of  France ! 

After  a  week  of  ignominy,  he  rode  into  the  town  of  Frejus, 
where,  on  landing  from  his  Egyptian  campaign,  he  had  re- 
ceived a  delirious  greeting  as  the  saviour  of  the  country  from 
the  Allies  and  the  Bourbons.  Now  as  he  stepped  aboard  the 
British  warship  Undaunted,  he  welcomed  the  flag  of  his  most 
hated  foe  as  a  refuge  and  a  protection  from  his  own  people. 

Even  as  the  Emperor  was  boarding  the  Undaunted,  the 
Empress  and  the  King  of  Rome  were  being  conducted  within 
the  lines  of  the  Austrian  army  at  Dijon.  The  Allies  had 
taken  away  not  only  his  Empire  but  his  wife  and  boy  as  well. 
After  all  Marie  Louise  was  only  a  trophy  of  victory,  a  hos- 
tage which  Austria  had  given  to  the  conqueror,  and  now  she 
and  her  son  were  convoyed  out  of  France  along  the  same  road 
by  which  the  Army  of  the  Sovereigns  had  marched  against 
her  husband. 

Death  next  joined  the  Allies  and  reinforced  the  battalions 
of  sorrows  that  were  assailing  Napoleon  on  all  sides.  Jose- 
phine had  not  seen  the  Emperor  since  he  started  on  his  fatal 
plunge  into  the  Russian  wastes,  and  she  no  longer  spoke  his 
name.  While  he  was  breasting  the  waves  of  invaders  in  the 
valley  of  the  Seine,  she  sat,  listless  and  tearful,  among  her 
ladies  at  Malmaison,  making  bandages  for  the  wounded. 

After  the  fall  of  Paris,  she  received  a  call  from  the  Czar, 
who  pledged  his  protection.  But  she  was  troubled  less  about 
herself  than  about  her  children.  ''Must  I  again  see  them 
wandering  and  destitute?"  she  sighed.  "The  thought  is  kill- 
ing me. ' '  Alexander 's  kindness  aroused  in  her  the  hope  that 
he  might  be  their  protector.     Her  cordial  welcome  encouraged 


THE  FIRST  ABDICATION  401 

him  to  come  again  and  again  to  dine  with  her  and  stroll 
in  her  flowered  paths. 

Russian  grand  dukes  and  German  princes  hastened  out  to 
the  chateau,  and  even  the  King  of  Prussia  brought  the  two 
sons  of  Queen  Louise  to  see  the  wife  of  the  victor  of  Jena 
and  the  tyrant  of  Tilsit.  Only  the  Emperor  of  Austria  balked 
at  the  suggestion  that  he  pay  his  respects  to  ]\Iarie  Louise's 
fair  predecessor.  But  Josephine  said,  "Why  not,  indeed? 
It  is  not  I  whom  he  has  dethroned,  but  his  own  daughter ! ' ' 

Under  the  patronage  of  the  Allies,  Malmaison  became  a 
court  again.  In  the  midst  of  the  merry  scenes,  however,  Jose- 
phine ailed — but  it  was  only  a  cold.  Her  physician  ordered 
her  to  bed,  but  she  persisted  in  her  anxious  attentions  to  the 
new  masters  of  her  destiny  and  of  her  children's.  On  the 
day  of  her  death,  she  insisted  on  being  dressed  in  a  beautiful 
robe-de-chambre,  and  we  are  told  that  when  she  welcomed  her 
silent  deliverer  from  a  strange  and  troubled  life,  she  lay  in 
her  pretty  ribbons  and  rose  satin,  murmuring  of  "Bonaparte" 
and  "Elba." 

Her  body  was  borne  into  the  village  church  of  Rueil,  where 
it  rests  beside  the  altar  in  a  marble  tomb  erected  by  her 
children.  Above  it,  her  sculptured  figure  kneels  in  prayer, 
while  across  the  church,  Hortense  lies  in  a  tomb  which  her 
son,  Napoleon  III,  inscribed  to  the  "daughter  and  sister  of 
Napoleon  I."  Far  away  in  the  New  World,  another  shrine 
to  the  memory  of  Josephine  rises  by  the  shore  of  her  native 
Martinique,  where  in  the  shade  of  palms  at  Fort  de  France, 
the  Creole  Empress  stands,  grasping  her  imperial  robes  with 
her  right  hand  while  her  left  rests  upon  a  medallion  of 
Napoleon. 


CHAPTER  XLVI 

EMPEROR  OF  ELBA 

1814-1815     AGE  44-45 

THE  monarchs  of  Europe  who  sent  Napoleon  to  Elba 
must  have  been  endued  with  a  rare  sense  of  humour. 
It  is  easily  the  best  joke  in  history. 

What  a  mocking  satire  it  was  to  give  the  Great  Captain  a 
little  toy  army  and  navy,  crown  the  proud  kingmaker  Em- 
peror of  eighty-six  square  miles  of  rocks  in  the  midst  of  his 
native  IMediterranean  and  hand  him  a  rattle  for  a  sceptre — 
to  reduce  the  Empire  of  the  mighty  conqueror  who  had  amused 
himself  by  dismembering  kingdoms,  to  a  tiny  realm  three  to 
six  miles  wide  and  nineteen  miles  long — to  leave  the  captor 
of  the  capitals  of  Europe  in  possession  of  only  three  or  four 
wretched  fishing  villages — to  make  the  sovereign  of  sovereigns 
ruler  over  12,000  fishermen,  miners,  and  goatherds! 

The  mockery  was  only  heightened  by  the  choice  of  an  island 
where  the  continent  he  had  lost  lay  in  full  view  of  the  exile. 
For  Elba  is  but  seven  miles  at  the  least  from  the  mainland  of 
Italy,  although  it  is  a  steamer  voyage  of  more  than  twelve 
miles  from  Piombino  to  Portoferrajo,  the  imperial  capital 
which  Napoleon  exchanged  for  Paris. 

The  town  of  Portoferrajo  forms  a  delightful  drop  curtain 
for  the  opera  bouife,  which  was  staged  there  and  which  en- 
joyed a  continuous  run  of  just  298  days  and  nights.  At  the 
top  of  the  scenic  picture,  outlined  against  the  turquoise  sky, 
two  massive  but  now  senile  forts  frown  down  in  an  amusingly 
menacing  way.  Beneath  them  the  stony  pink  little  town 
hangs  on  for  its  life  to  the  steep  side  of  a  hill,  while  the  an- 
cient town  wall  zigzags  down  to  the  shore,  where  it  thrusts  a 
long,  bended,  protecting  arm  into  a  perfect  harbour. 

402 


EMPEROR  OF  ELBA  403 

Out  over  the  end  of  this  huge  crumbling  wall  hangs  an  old 
watch  tower  and  out  of  a  window  in  this  sentry  box  idly  leans 
that  unfailing  delight  of  tourist  eyes — a  bersagliere,  with  his 
rifle  over  his  shoulder  and  his  bunch  of  long  cocks'  feathers 
trailing  from  his  hat.  Around  the  end  of  the  wall  the  steamer 
glides  into  the  snug  little  mole  behind  it  and  ties  up  at  the 
stone  dock. 

At  the  shore  end  of  the  dock  rises  the  ancient  town  gate, 
through  which  the  visitor  passes  at  once  into  the  very  Porto- 
ferrajo,  unchanging  in  its  petrification,  which  was  set  agog 
at  eight  o'clock  in  the  morning  of  the  3d  of  ]\Iay,  in  the  year 
1814,  when  the  lookout  descried  a  British  man-of-war,  under 
full  sail,  bearing  down  upon  the  town. 

When  Napoleon  came  ashore  the  next  afternoon,  the  guns  of 
Fort  Stella — the  fort  of  his  new  star — boomed  over  the 
crowded  rooftops,  and  he  was  conducted  to  the  cathedral,  where 
he  knelt  in  the  doorway  while  the  Te  Deum  was  sung.  Ten 
crowded  years  stretched  between  that  month  of  May,  when  he 
was  hailed  Emperor  of  Elba  and  another  May  when  he  had 
been  acclaimed  Emperor  of  the  French — the  two  extremes  of 
imperial  fortunes. 

Two  of  his  generals  had  followed  him  into  exile.  General 
Bertrand  was  grand  marshal  of  the  palace,  while  the  military 
governor  was  General  Drouot,  the  artillery  commander  whose 
guns  were  wont  to  give  the  finishing  touch  to  Napoleonic  vic- 
tories on  the  battlefield.  The  imperial  household  also  neces- 
sarily had  its  prefects  of  the  palace,  its  court  chaplain,  its 
chamberlain,  its  physician,  its  musical  director,  its  keeper  of 
the  wardrobe  and  its  footmen  and  ushers. 

An  army  lieutenant,  although  a  prey  to  violent  seasickness, 
was  the  commander  of  the  fleet,  which  consisted  of  the  flagship 
Inconstant,  a  rotten  old  French  brig  of  sixteen  guns  and  sixty 
men;  the  Caroline,  of  one  gun  and  sixteen  men;  the  feluccas 
Abeille  and  Mouche,  each  with  eight  men,  and  the  xebec 
Etoile  of  six  guns  and  sixteen  men.  The  foremost  figure  in 
the  army  was  Cambronne,  a  gallant  fire  eater  of  the  Old 
Guard,  who  declared  that  his  "uniform  and  its  very  lining" 
commanded    him    to    follow    Napoleon.     Arriving   at    Porto- 


404  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ferrajo  with  700  men  of  the  Guard,  some  time  after  the  Em- 
pire had  been  set  up,  the  veterans  at  sight  of  the  Emperor 
"wept  copiously  into  their  moustaches,"  as  the  imperial  chron- 
icles record.  Once  the  army  was  completely  organised,  it  con- 
sisted of  a  Corsican  battalion,  the  Polish  lancers,  a  mameluke 
contingent,  and  the  grenadiers  and  chasseurs  of  the  Old 
Guard,  with  a  grand  total  of  1600  officers  and  men. 

Not  only  did  his  veterans  of  the  Guard  follow  Napoleon  to 
Elba,  but  his  war  horses  also  came  to  eat  their  oats  in  banish- 
ment. There  was  the  little  white  arab  Wagram,  who  pawed 
his  stall  and  whinnied  for  sugar  whenever  the  man  whom  he 
had  borne  to  the  conquest  of  Vienna  and  the  capture  of  a 
bride  came  near.  There  also  were  bays  and  chestnuts  who,  in 
Spain  or  Russia  or  Germany,  had  sped  him  down  the  hill  from 
the  heights  of  glory.  A  silvery  Persian,  although  a  gift  from 
the  Czar,  had  nevertheless  returned  to  Russia  as  an  invading 
foe,  and  it  was  on  his  back  that  Napoleon  viewed  Moscow  from 
Sparrow  Hill.  On  his  back,  too,  he  would  yet  fight  another 
battle — at  Waterloo  ! 

Nor  did  the  horses  lack  for  exercise.  Imperial  progresses 
were  forever  on  the  schedule.  In  his  gold  coach,  with  all 
brakes  set  and  with  the  postillions  cracking  their  whips  even 
while  they  leaned  back  on  the  reins.  His  Majesty  daily 
coasted  down  the  perpendicular  streets  of  the  capital,  his 
grand  marshal,  his  military  governor  and  his  grooms  gallop- 
ing at  the  wheels.  He  did  not  pause  until  he  had  visited  all 
the  little  hamlets  which,  with  rustic  arches  of  triumph,  with 
children  scattering  flowers  in  the  imperial  pathway,  with 
priests  chanting  Te  Deums,  bravely  tried  to  outrival  one  an- 
other in  honouring  their  sovereign. 

The  Emperor  graciously  made  due  allowance  for  the  awk- 
wardness of  his  untutored  courtiers,  whose  insular  and  pastoral 
democracy  never  before  had  been  called  upon  to  render  hom- 
age to  a  crowned  head.  "When,  however,  a  militia  sergeant, 
in  an  excess  of  kindness  and  strength,  too  vigorously  aided 
him  to  mount  his  horse,  which  he  ever  found  a  difficult  feat, 
by  seizing  him  bodily  and  pitching  him,  kicking  and  protest- 
ing into  the  saddle,  he  could  not  condone  such  conduct  on  the 


EMPEROR  OF  ELBA  405 

part  of  a  common  soldier.  Instead  of  punishing  the  sergeant, 
he  adopted  a  Gilbertian  expedient  and  promoted  him  to  a  lieu- 
tenancy, a  rank  that  somewhat  excused  the  liberty  he  had 
taken  with  the  sacred  person  of  His  Majesty ! 

In  the  very  first  fortnight  of  his  reign,  the  forts  and  the 
mines  were  inspected,  most  of  the  mountains  were  ascended 
and  every  mule  path  in  the  island  was  traversed  by  the  Em- 
peror, who  left  behind  him  wherever  he  went  his  command 
for  public  improvements.  When  the  wagon  roads  left  off,  he 
took  to  the  saddle.  When  even  the  paths  stopped,  he  pressed 
on  afoot,  walking  under  a  broiling  sun  for  ten  hours  at  a 
stretch  and  "working  the  flesh  off  the  bones  of  every  one," 
to  quote  again  the  chronicler  of  the  Empire. 

When  he  had  completed  his  exploration  of  Elba,  he  sighed 
for  more  islands  and  sailed  away  to  the  south,  where  he  found 
the  midget  islet  of  Pianosa,  inhabited  only  by  wild  sheep. 
Annexing  it  on  the  instant,  he  fitted  out  and  despatched  a 
colony  with  orders  to  fortify  and  cultivate  it.  In  the  same 
era  of  expansion  the  island  of  Palmaiola  also  was  annexed  and 
fortified. 

Having  surveyed  and  organised  his  Empire,  the  Emperor 
next  turned  to  the  erection  of  his  imperial  palaces.  To  es- 
cape from  the  little  suite  which  had  been  hastily  furnished  for 
him,  up  one  flight  in  the  city  hall,  he  purchased  a  windmill, 
at  the  top  of  the  hill.  There  he  erected  from  his  own  plans 
his  new  Tuileries,  but  in  memory  of  the  demolished  mill  he 
christened  it  the  Mulini. 

The  streets  of  Portoferrajo  consist  chiefly  of  three  steep 
stairways  up  the  fort-crowned  height,  and  several  shelves  across 
the  face  of  the  hill.  These  stairs  are  named  via  Napoleone, 
via  Victor  Hugo  and  via  Garibaldi,  their  names  recalling  three 
interesting  and  diverse  characters,  who  at  different  times  sailed 
into  the  little  Elban  world.  Garibaldi  hid  there  for  awhile  in 
the  troubled  days  of  '48,  and  there  Hugo  passed  three  or  four 
years  of  his  infancy,  while  his  father,  an  army  officer  under 
Bonaparte,  First  Consul  of  France,  was  aiding  to  establish 
French  rule  in  the  island. 

At  the  foot  of  each  of  those  street-stairways  lies  the  harbour. 


406  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

while  Fort  Stella,  the  IMulini  palace  and  Fort  Falcone  stand 
in  a  row  at  the  top.  The  IMulini,  which  is  the  property  of  the 
Italian  government  now,  really  is  no  palace  at  all,  but  a 
severely  plain,  modest  dwelling,  its  plastered  walls  rising  one 
and  two  stories  from  a  little  public  square,  the  Piazzale  Na- 
poleone.  Some  officials  are  now  installed  in  it,  but  the  green 
shutters  are  tightly  closed  on  the  Emperor's  own  special  apart- 
ments, which  are  silent  and  untenanted,  save  for  the  spiders 
that  spin  their  webs  in  the  bare  rooms  where  once  Napoleon 
himself  wove  a  clever  little  web. 

At  the  end  of  the  house,  a  stone  wall  shuts  in  the  yard,  but 
the  custodian  swings  the  gate  on  its  creaking  hinges,  the 
visitor  passes  in  between  two  stone  posts,  on  which  cannon 
balls  are  piled,  and  is  in  the  haunted  stillness  of  the  little 
dooryard  garden  of  the  imperial  exile.  It  is  still  fragrant 
with  the  bloom  of  flowers,  and  in  a  circle  of  purple  lilies  stands 
a  marble  Minerva,  the  statue  and  the  encircling  flowers  com- 
bining to  suggest  the  warrior  who  put  on  the  purple.  There 
are  also  a  palm  and  a  pine  tree,  which  seem  to  symbolise  the 
wide  rule  that  he  exchanged  for  his  island  empire. 

Did  he  not  boast  that  "I  overlook  Europe  from  my  win- 
dows?" Well,  there  are  the  windows,  giving  on  the  garden. 
There  across  the  flower  patch  is  the  parapet  of  the  little  ter- 
race, hanging  high  above  the  blue  Tyrrhenian  Sea,  and  there 
is  Europe,  away  off  through  the  cerulean  haze,  where  the 
mountains  of  Italy  break  the  horizon. 

The  St.  Cloud,  or  suburban  palace  of  the  Elban  Empire 
lies  about  three  miles  from  Portoferrajo's  only  gate,  which  is 
made  trebly  difficult  for  assailants  and  invaders  by  taking  the 
form  of  a  long,  dark,  twisting  tunnel  through  the  broad  wall. 
Just  outside  the  gate,  the  smokestacks  of  a  modern  steel  mill 
smudge  the  azure  sky.  Beyond  the  mill,  the  dusty  road,  the 
only  road  from  the  town,  stretches  about  the  beautiful  little 
bay  until  the  pilgrim  to  San  Martino  leaves  it  for  the  bj^way 
that  winds  up  a  pretty  green  hill  where  Napoleon's  simple 
suburban  retreat  nestles  in  a  sylvan  shade. 

Here  the  banished  lord  of  all  Europe  settled  down  to  the 
task  of  tilling  a  few  acres  of  earth  and  to  establishing  a  farm 


EMPEROR  OF  ELBA  407 

that  should  be  a  model  for  his  subjects.  He  planted  a  grove 
of  mulberry  trees  and  he  introduced  the  potato  into  the  is- 
land. But  a  tablet  on  a  wall  in  one  of  the  hamlets  thus  re- 
cords his  overthrow  as  a  ploughman :  ' '  Napoleon,  while  pass- 
ing by,  took  the  plough  from  a  peasant,  but  the  oxen  rebelled 
against  the  hands  that  had  guided  Europe  and  broke  away 
from  the  furrow." 

Since  the  Emperor  was  resolved  to  be  a  farmer,  San  IMar- 
tino  is  but  a  farmliouse  of  twelve  modest  sized  rooms  and 
even  less  palatial  than  the  ]Mulini.  Its  two-story  front  con- 
tracts into  a  one-story  cottage  in  the  rear,  where  the  rising 
hill  cuts  off  the  lower  floor,  and  whither  the  driveway  leads. 

The  entrance,  therefore,  is  to  the  upper  floor  and  into  the 
Hall  of  the  Pyramids.  A  sunken  fountain  is  in  the  centre 
of  this  room,  the  walls  of  which  are  covered  with  imitation 
columns  and  carvings  that  some  simple  artist  of  the  miniature 
empire  crudely  designed  to  recall  the  campaign  on  the  Nile. 
On  one  of  the  columns  the  Emperor  caused  to  be  painted  this 
inscription,  calculated  at  once  to  taunt  and  reassure  the  mon- 
archs  who  sent  him  to  Elba : 


Napoleon  is  Happy  Everywhere. 


The  room  of  General  Bertrand,  the  grand  marshal,  opens 
from  one  side  of  the  Salle  des  Pyramides,  while  on  the  other 
side  is  the  imperial  salon,  where  two  doves  flutter  in  the  blue 
sky  that  overspreads  the  ceiling,  the  Emperor  having  com- 
manded that  they  ' '  be  fastened  together  by  a  cord,  the  knot  of 
which  tightens  the  farther  they  fly  apart, ' '  It  was  the  exile 's 
expression  of  his  hope  and  longing  for  Marie  Louise.  Alas, 
only  a  ribbon  unites  the  doves,  while  swords  and  bayonets  cut 
asunder  the  imperial  pair. 

In  the  next  room  beyond  the  salon  of  the  doves,  the  Em- 
peror slept.  Below  his  chamber,  down  a  steep  stair,  which 
has  only  a  rope  in  place  of  a  banister  rail,  is  his  bathroom. 


408  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

There  above  his  marble  tub  the  naked  fi^re  of  Truth  painted 
on  the  wall,  continues  to  peer  into  a  mirror  with  this  moral 
inscribed  below:     "He  who  hates  the  truth,  hates  the  light." 

The  charm  of  San  Martino  lies  not  within  its  now  bare  and 
almost  humble  walls,  but  out  of  doors,  where  Nature  was  the 
imperial  furnisher  and  decorator.  There  one  may  tread  Na- 
poleon 's  path  into  the  depths  of  a  lovely  grove  over  a  singing 
brook  and  to  the  spring,  where  he  used  to  fill  his  leathern  cup. 
Or  the  visitor  may  step  from  the  imperial  suite  in  the  house 
out  upon  the  terrace  where,  with  his  spy  glass  pointed  straight 
ahead,  the  Emperor  could  examine  every  sail  entering  the 
harbour  of  Portoferrajo,  and  by  turning  a  little  to  the  left, 
could  survey  the  forts  and  roofs  of  his  capital. 

Long  after  the  Elban  exile  was  over  and  even  six  feet  of 
earth  sufficed  Napoleon,  San  Martino  was  purchased  by 
Prince  Demidoff,  the  husband  of  Princess  Mathilde,  daughter 
of  King  Jerome  Bonaparte.  Unfortunately  the  Prince  was 
not  so  much  interested  in  preserving  the  simplicity  of  the 
place  as  in  glorifying  his  unele-in-law.  In  his  misdirected 
zeal  he  set  up  a  high  iron  fence  of  gold-tipped  spears  and 
costly  ornate  gates  with  bees  and  eagles  and  wreathes  wrought 
in  them. 

The  capital  offence  of  the  nephew  by  marriage  was  the  erec- 
tion of  a  big  stone  temple  with  high  columns  and  pillars,  which 
he  planted  squarely  in  front  of  and  against  the  villa  as  if  to 
hide  it  from  the  world.  Obtrusive  as  this  structure  is  when 
viewed  from  the  road,  happily  it  is  not  seen  from  the  house 
itself,  but  disappears  beneath  the  terrace. 

The  Prince  intended  to  found  there  a  great  Napoleonic  mu- 
seum. He  had  no  more  than  gathered  together  all  the  relics  of 
the  Emperor  in  the  island,  however,  than  his  feverish  interest 
in  Elba  seems  to  have  subsided  and  the  collection  was  carried 
off  to  Florence,  whence  in  time  it  was  dispersed  through  the 
world.  Thus  the  Elbans  have  hardly  an  old  shoe  or  hat  to 
show  for  their  vanished  Empire.  Fortunately  they  still  have 
the  walls  the  Emperor  reared,  but  those  of  San  Martino  are 
held  in  a  precarious  proprietorship.  They  passed  from  the 
Demidoff  family  into  the  hands  of  an  islander  who  had  grown 


EMPEROR  OF  ELBA  409 

rich  from  the  Elban  mines.  While  this  new  landlord  was  at- 
tempting to  fill  the  bare  cabinets  of  the  museum  with  a  natural 
history  collection,  he  lost  his  fortune,  and  some  Italian 
creditors  took  his  property,  including  the  historic  but  deserted 
villa. 

When  the  heat  of  the  southern  summer  descended  upon  San 
Martino,  a  still  simpler  abiding  place  was  chosen  by  the  Em- 
peror. This  was  in  the  house  of  a  religious  hermit,  who  tended 
an  altar  of  the  Madonna  high  up  Monte  Giove.  On  the  2500- 
foot  climb  along  the  stony  path  to  this  solitary  hermitage, 
where  the  altar  candles  are  still  kept  burning,  the  traveller 
leaves  the  village  of  Marciana  JMarina,  at  the  shore,  and  passes 
through  the  mountain  hamlet  of  Marciana  Alta  to  the  Ma- 
donna's lonely  chapel. 

There,  in  the  late  summer  of  his  Elban  year,  Napoleon 
passed  a  fortnight  in  the  four-room  stone  hut  of  the  hermit, 
although  he  really  slept  in  a  tent.  There,  too,  is  a  rocky 
throne — Napoleon's  seat,  it  is  called.  From  it  he  looked  over 
the  amethystine  sea  to  the  northern  slopes  of  his  native 
Corsica,  with  the  town  of  Bastia  shining  white  against  the 
verdant  mountain  sides.  How  near  together  his  two  islands 
were,  and  yet  how  long  the  path  between  them ! 

The  Elbans,  only  less  eagerly  than  the  Emperor,  watched 
for  the  coming  of  Marie  Louise  and  her  child.  Napoleon 
himself  at  first  hoped  and  next  begged  that  those  who  had 
taken  away  his  empire  would  restore  to  him  his  wife  and 
son.     His  efforts  were  vain. 

The  politicians,  so  far  from  permitting  the  mother  and 
child  to  join  him,  would  not  even  let  them  go  to  their  allotted 
duchy,  because  Parma  was  too  near  Elba.  They  separated 
the  Empress  and  the  boy,  and  moved  her  about  from  place  to 
place,  like  a  piece  on  a  chessboard.  At  first  she  mildly  begged 
to  be  allowed  to  join  her  husband  in  his  exile,  but  soon  her 
father  brought  her  ba.ck  to  her  girlhood  habit  of  obedience  to 
his  will.  And  almost  before  her  summer  wanderings  in 
Switzerland  were  over,  her  pliant  affections  were  quite  di- 
verted to  Count  Neipperg,  an  ingi'atiating  courtier  whom 
Mettemich  had  craftily  chosen  to  attend  her. 


410  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  mother  of  the  Emperor,  whose  prophetic  soul  had  fore- 
told the  coming  of  rainy  days  and  whose  maternal  thrift  had 
made  provision  for  them,  came  to  him  as  soon  as  he  was  fairly 
settled,  and  she  faithfully  stayed  by  his  side.  Mme.  Mere's 
companion  was  her  daughter  Pauline.  The  heedless  gaiety 
of  this  Princess  had  been  Napoleon's  torment  in  prosperity, 
but  now  she  just  as  gaily  shared  her  brother's  fallen  fortunes. 

The  next  of  the  imperial  habitations  the  Emperor  chose 
after  he  left  the  Hermitage  was  hardly  less  unconventional 
and  romantic.  This  was  an  old  castle  at  Porto  Longone,  the 
second  port  of  Elba  and  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  island 
from  Portoferrajo.  There  a  suite  of  six  rooms  was  fitted  up, 
the  Emperor  choosing  for  himself  a  turret  looking  out  upon 
the  Italian  shore. 

He  now  had  four  "palaces,"  but  Elban  palaces  came  cheap. 
A  tent  sufficed  on  j\Ionte  Giove,  and  for  Porto  Longone  three 
iron  beds,  two  carpets,  a  few  plain  chairs  at  a  cost  of  $1  each 
and  two  or  three  equally  simple  armchairs  and  sofas  were 
ordered.  Indeed  the  furnishings  of  the  citadel  were  almost 
as  severely  simple  as  they  are  to-day,  when  it  is  the  gloomy 
abode  of  life  convicts  sent  from  the  mainland. 

The  construction  or  selection  of  palaces  was  but  a  diver- 
sion, an  innocent  pastime  of  the  island  Emperor.  His  more 
serious  care  was  bestowed  upon  the  welfare  of  Elba.  While 
he  housed  himself  and  maintained  his  table  with  almost  ascetic 
frugality,  he  shared  with  the  local  officials  half  the  expense 
of  all  public  improvements  that  he  ordered.  Finding  no 
roads,  he  built  them,  and  wisely  planned  a  complete  highway 
system,  which  still  serves  the  convenience  of  the  people,  who 
have  yet  no  railways.  It  was  under  his  inspiration  and  direc- 
tion that  the  husbandmen  planted  and  sowed  the  waste  places, 
and  the  long-neglected  soil  was  made  so  productive  that  it 
supplies  now  nearly  all  the  needs  of  a  population  three  or 
four  times  greater  than  the  number  of  inhabitants  a  century 
ago. 

Although  it  was  a  tradition  among  the  people  that  climate 
and  earth  alike  were  unfriendly  to  the  olive,  the  lemon,  the 
orange  and  the  mulberry,  he  introduced  them  in  the  island, 


EMPEROR  OF  ELBA  411 

and  they  are  flourishing  there  to  this  day.  He  developed  an 
abundant  water  supply  against  seasons  of  drouth  and  he  im- 
proved the  health  of  the  people  by  draining  the  swamps  and 
by  barring  the  mosquitoes  from  the  springs  and  wells.  He 
also  swept  the  streets  and  gave  the  islanders  their  first  lessons 
in  cleanliness  and  sanitation. 

In  that  attribute  which  is  next  to  godliness,  the  Portoferrajo 
of  to-day,  with  its  8000  people,  is  a  shining  example  and  as 
well  scrubbed  as  a  village  in  Holland.  The  little  hotel  which 
perpetuates  the  memory  of  the  imperial  symbol  in  its  name, 
''Albergo  I'Ape  Elbana" — Inn  of  the  Elban  Bee — is  as  clean 
and  unpretending  as  the  town. 

The  townspeople,  the  Elbans  as  a  whole,  are  in  keeping  with 
their  unique,  if  brief  chapter  in  history.  The  women  are 
pretty,  modest  and  modish,  the  men  kind,  honest  and  self- 
respecting  in  their  welcome  of  the  stranger  who  comes  among 
them  seeking  the  shrines  and  mementos  of  the  Empire  that 
rose  and  fell  in  ten  months. 

The  custodian  of  the  municipio,  a  veteran  of  Solferino, 
gently  unfurls  in  the  salon  of  the  Emperor  the  flag  of  the 
Empire,  with  its  silver  bees,  and  the  librarian  proudly  dis- 
plays the  cherished  remnants  of  Napoleon's  Elban  library. 
The  janitor  of  the  theatre,  for  a  church  w^as  made  over  into  an 
imperial  theatre,  seats  his  callers  in  the  Emperor's  box  to  watch 
him  lower  the  original  drop  curtain,  w' ith  its  pictorial  allegory 
of  Apollo  fallen  from  the  skies  to  shepherd  a  little  flock,  even 
as  Napoleon  descended  from  the  throne  of  Europe  to  care  for 
the  Elbans.  While  one  good  man  is  showing  some  empty  wine 
bottles  which  he  treasures  because  they  bear  the  "N"  in  the 
laurel  wreath,  Signorina,  his  daughter,  arrays  herself  in  the 
gown  her  great-grandmother  wore  at  the  imperial  court.  The 
Elbans  even  have  a  young  man  who  sufficiently  resembles 
their  Emperor  to  have  satisfied  the  requirements  of  the  oper- 
ators of  a  moving  picture  concern,  W'hen  they  came  to  make 
some  films  of  the  exile  and  the  flight,  and  this  "Napoleon  of 
the  Movies"  has  become  an  added  exhibit  of  Portoferrajo. 

The  Empire  has  a  day  all  to  itself  in  the  island  calendar. 
This  day  of  days  is  the  5th  of  IMay,  the  anniversary  of  the 


412     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Emperor's  death  on  another  island  less  fair.  Each  year,  the 
custodian  of  the  municipio  gives  to  the  breeze  the  flag  of  the 
Empire  and  solemn  services  are  held  in  the  church  of  the 
Miserecordia,  which  is  hung  in  black  and  gold.  From  a  niche 
in  the  wall  behind  doors  covered  with  crowns  and  eagles,  a 
coffin  in  imitation  of  the  Emperor's  at  the  Invalides  in  Paris, 
is  reverently  brought  forth  and  borne  to  the  altar  rail,  where 
the  worshippers  passing  by  may  see  through  a  glass,  the  death 
mask  of  Napoleon  resting  on  a  pillow  within  the  coffin.  This 
yearly  memorial  service  was  established  for  all  time  by  a 
provision  of  Prince  Demidoff's  will,  and  the  Prince  also  left 
a  legacy  for  the  poor  which  is  distributed  on  each  5th  of 
May. 

Visitors  to  Elba  are  few  in  number  and  the  Elbans  have  not 
been  tempted  to  commercialise  their  past  and  exploit  it. 
There  are  neither  guides  nor  guide  books  in  the  little,  un- 
sophisticated capital.  The  sturdy  island  race  is  yet  un- 
awed  by  the  condescension  and  uncorrupted  by  the  tips  of 
tourists,  who  pass  by  with  the  thought,  perhaps,  that  it  must 
be  a  dreary  prison  isle,  the  limbo  of  the  condemned,  instead 
of  the  rare  little  gem  that  it  really  is  on  the  jewelled  bosom 
of  the  tideless  sea. 


CHAPTER  XLVII 
THE  RETURN  FROM  ELBA 

1815      AGE  45 

NAPOLEON'S  return  from  Elba,  in  March,  1815,  is 
the  most  adventurous  exploit  in  a  life  of  adventure. 
Yet  those  who  look  upon  all  human  history  as  the 
prosaic  story  of  one  long  struggle  for  bread  and  butter  have 
some  warrant  for  contending  that  in  escaping  from  the  island, 
in  marching  on  Paris,  in  reclaiming  the  crown  of  France  and 
in  fighting  the  Battle  of  Waterloo,  he  was  not  inspired  by  a 
love  of  country  or  glory  but  impelled  by  the  fear  of  hunger 
and  poverty.  In  a  letter  to  his  government  three  months  be- 
fore the  flight,  the  British  commander.  Colonel  Campbell, 
expressed  the  opinion  that  the  Emperor  would  contentedly 
pass  the  rest  of  his  life  in  the  island  if  he  received  his  pen- 
sion, but  that  if  he  was  left  without  an  income  he  would  prob- 
ably take  his  troops  and  cross  over  to  the  mainland. 

By  the  Treaty  of  Fontainebleau  at  the  time  of  the  abdica- 
tion, Austria,  Eussia  and  Prussia  guaranteed  Napoleon  the  sov- 
ereignty of  Elba  and  a  yearly  income  of  $400,000  from  the 
French  treasury,  while  his  mother  and  his  brothers  and  sis- 
ters were  to  receive  and  divide  among  themselves  $500,000 
a  year.  The  duchies  of  Parma,  Placentia  and  Guastalla 
were  pledged  to  Marie  Louise,  and  after  her,  to  the  King  of 
Rome  and  his  descendants,  and  a  suitable  provision  was  to 
be  made  for  Prince  Eugene  Beauharnais. 

None  of  those  promises  was  kept.  The  Allies,  who  sat 
down  in  the  Congress  of  Vienna  to  divide  the  spoils  of  their 
victory,  gave  Eugene  nothing,  determined  that  the  son  of 
Napoleon  should  not  inherit  his  mother's  duchy  or  be  per- 

413 


414     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

mitted  even  to  live  with  her,  and  they  suffered  the  Bourbon 
King  of  France  to  withhold  from  the  Emperor  the  annuity 
stipulated  in  the  treaty. 

Although  he  is  supposed  to  have  brought  with  him  from 
France  nearly  $800,000,  Napoleon  began  to  feel  the  pinch 
acutely  as  the  months  went  by.  He  pressed  the  people  for 
their  taxes  until  they  riotously  rebelled  and  he  raked  together 
all  the  useless  old  guns,  and  shipped  them  to  Italy,  where  he 
sold  them  for  junk  and  where  he  also  found  a  market  for 
some  mouldy  flour  which  he  discovered  in  the  commissariat. 

When  he  adopted  the  expedient  of  paying  off  with  due 
bills  on  the  French  treasury,  a  feeling  of  homesickness  spread 
among  his  troops  and  retainers  until  it  threatened  to  become 
epidemic,  and  the  army  dwindled  away  from  resignations  and 
desertions.  And  the  soldiers  were  no  mere  ornaments  of 
the  Empire.  The  Emperor  had  organised  the  little  army  to 
defend  his  island  against  the  ever-present  peril  of  the  Bar- 
bary  corsairs,  but  as  time  wore  on,  he  came  to  regard  it  as 
his  only  protection  from  assassination  or  deportation  at  the 
instance  of  the  allied  nations  themselves. 

Talleyrand  and  Louis  XVIII  were  agreed  that  he  should 
be  sent  farther  away,  to  the  Azores,  perhaps,  which  were 
some  800  miles  out  in  the  Atlantic,  or  to  St.  Lucia  in  the 
West  Indies.  His  Corsican  enemy,  Pozzo  di  Borgo,  re- 
ported a  unanimous  sentiment  among  the  statesmen  gathered 
in  Vienna,  for  his  removal  "from  the  eyes  of  Europe"  and 
' '  as  far  as  possible. ' '  Pozzo  himself  thought  St.  Helena  would 
be  an  excellent  choice. 

When  Talleyrand  declared  "we  must  hasten  to  get  rid  of 
the  man  from  Elba,"  Napoleon  was  left  in  doubt  whether 
he  would  be  called  upon  to  defend  himself  from  kidnapers 
or  assassins.  The  choice  really  had  narrowed  down  to  abduc- 
tion or  assassination,  bankruptcy  or  flight  when  he  chose  the 
latter.  He  knew  that  France  was  growing  restive  under  the 
reactionary  policy  of  the  Bourbon  rule  which  foreign  armies 
had  imposed  on  the  country,  and  that  the  French  army  was 
filled  with  the  spirit  of  revolt. 

As  he  wrestled  with  his  problem  in  secret,  he  retired  more 


THE  RETURN  FROM  ELBA  415 

and  more  within  himself.  Colonel  Campbell,  the  British  com- 
missioner, was  impressed  with  "something  wild  in  his  air." 
When,  however,  the  colonel,  in  the  middle  of  February,  made 
a  parting  call  before  leaving  for  a  brief  absence  in  Italy,  he 
found  the  Emperor  "unusually  dull  and  reserved,"  appar- 
ently interested  in  nothing  but  the  affairs  of  his  little  Em- 
pire, its  roads  and  bridges,  and  in  his  farms  and  gardens, 
with  their  cabbages  and  onions  and  flower  beds.  Neverthe- 
less, Campbell  had  his  misgivings,  but  his  suspicions  were 
laughed  away  in  Florence.  "When  you  return  to  Elba,"  an 
inspired  British  under  secretary  of  state  for  foreign  affairs 
said  to  the  commissioner,  "you  may  tell  Bonaparte  that  he 
is  quite  forgotten  in  Europe.  Nobody  thinks  of  him  at  all. 
He  is  quite  forgotten — as  much  as  if  he  had  never  existed." 

Meanwhile  the  Great  Forgotten  was  dividing  his  attentions 
between  the  flower  beds  at  the  Mulini  and  at  Fort  Stella, 
which  his  soldiers  were  laboriously  preparing,  and  the  equip- 
ment of  his  leaky  little  navy  for  a  mysterious  cruise.  Abso- 
lutely no  one  else  knew  when  or  whither  the  vessels  would 
sail,  until  he  let  Mme.  Mere  into  the  secret  the  day  before  the 
departure  and  received  the  blessing  of  that  spartan  mother. 

The  next  day  was  Sunday,  and  there  was  a  levee  at  the 
Mulini,  when  the  Emperor  astounded  the  company  by  frankly 
announcing  that  he  should  quit  Elba  that  night.  The  island 
was  already  shut  in,  no  boat  having  been  permitted  to  leave  or 
enter  any  of  the  ports  for  two  days.  All  the  while  the  grena- 
diers continued  to  pat  down  the  loam  in  the  garden. 

It  was  not  until  five  in  the  afternoon  that  the  drums  beat 
to  arms,  and  an  army  of  1100  men  embarked  for  the  con- 
quest of  France,  on  a  flotilla  comprising  the  brig  Inconstant, 
of  300  tons  and  eighteen  guns;  the  bombard  I'Etoile,  of 
eighty  tons,  and  five  feluccas  of  from  twenty-five  to  fifty  tons 
each.  It  was  an  enchanting  evening,  in  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  harbours  of  all  the  ]\Iediterranean.  The  Emperor 
stood  on  the  quarterdeck.  The  town  band  played  the  "I\Iar- 
seillaise."  The  townspeople  cheered  and  the  mayor's  tears 
fell  upon  the  dock. 

How    many    times    had    wind    and    wave    befriended    the 


416     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

islander  on  this,  his  native  sea !  They  had  borne  him  a  fugi- 
tive from  Corsica  to  Toulon  and  to  his  first  victory.  They 
had  parted  a  lane  for  him  through  Nelson's  fleet  as  he  went 
to  find  an  empire  in  the  east  and  as  he  returned  to  find  it  in 
the  west.  The  very  south  wind  which  now  sped  him  back 
to  his  throne,  left  Campbell  sitting  helplessly  under  the  lazily 
flapping  sails  of  the  British  warship  Partridge,  becalmed  in 
the  harbour  of  Leghorn. 

On  the  fourth  day  of  the  voyage  while  the  early  afternoon 
sun  was  glowing  on  the  terraced  gardens  of  the  French  shore 
and  glistening  on  the  still  snowy  peaks  of  the  Maritime  Alps, 
Napoleon  sailed  into  the  wide  Gulf  Juan.  On  one  side  of 
the  bay  he  saw  the  island  of  Marguerite.  As  he  glanced  at 
its  castle  walls  in  their  melancholy  beauty  rising  from  the 
waters  he  must  have  thought — as  who  does  not  ? — of  the  Pris- 
oner in  the  Iron  Mask,  who  has  left  his  mystery  clinging  to 
them  forever.  Across  the  bay  on  the  other  side,  the  roofs  of 
Antibes  must  have  called  to  his  recollection  another  prisoner 
— himself,  for  there  in  the  old  grey  fort  he  had  sat  in  the 
shadow  of  the  guillotine  after  the  fall  of  Robespierre. 

How  often  the  voyage  of  his  life  had  brought  him  to  that 
beautiful  Riviera ;  how  often  the  tide  in  his  affairs  had  borne 
him  in  and  out  of  its  lovely  harbours!  In  the  west,  was 
Toulon,  whither  he  had  come  an  exile  from  Corsica  only  two 
and  twenty  years  before,  where  he  fought  his  first  battle  and 
whence  he  embarked  for  Egypt.  Only  around  the  mountain- 
ous headland  to  his  left  was  the  port  of  Frejus,  where  he  had 
been  welcomed  home  from  the  Orient  and  whence  he  had  en- 
tered upon  his  Elban  banishment.  "Beyond  the  Antibean 
Cape  on  his  right,  lay  Nice,  where  he  had  taken  command  of 
the  Army  of  Italy,  and  farther  along  was  Savona,  out  of 
which  the  Little  Corporal  sped  in  the  night  to  burst  into  fame 
on  the  heights  of  Montenotte.  On  no  other  stage  had  he  so 
often  astonished  the  world.  Now  he  was  about  to  eclipse  all 
the  surprises  that  had  gone  before. 

The  passerby  along  the  villa-lined  avenue  from  Cannes  to 
Nice  sees  in  the  shade  of  a  tree  by  the  roadside,  a  simple  shaft 
of  stone  rising  to  tell  no  other  story  than  this: 


THE  RETURN  FROM  ELBA  417 


Souvenir  of 
March  1,  1815 


Not  another  word  is  carved  upon  the  monument.  It  is 
simply  a  place  mark  at  the  opening  page  of  an  extraordinary 
chapter  in  history.  Trolley  cars  and  a  procession  of  auto- 
mobiles now  race  by  the  stone,  where  a  century  ago  a  quiet 
country  lane  took  its  leisurely  course,  while  winter  hotels 
and  their  clutter  of  shops  look  upon  the  once  lonely  beach, 
where,  with  indifferent  curiosity,  a  few  charcoal  burners  and 
a  few  fishermen  mending  their  nets  saw  Napoleon  step 
ashore. 

"Now,"  he  chuckled,  "I  am  about  to  enact  a  great  nov- 
elty." He  very  well  knew  that  if  France  were  to  be  con- 
quered it  was  not  to  be  done  by  1100  followers,  but  by  him- 
self alone.  His  orders  to  Cambronne  were:  "Do  not  fire  a 
single  shot.  Remember,  I  wish  to  recapture  my  crown  with- 
out shedding  a  drop  of  blood."  Paper  bullets  were  to  be  his 
only  ammunition. 

"Frenchmen,"  he  proclaimed  in  a  shower  of  leaflets  that 
fell  before  him  as  he  advanced,  "in  my  exile  I  heard  your 
plaints  and  prayers.  ...  I  have  crossed  the  sea  amid  perils 
of  every  kind,  and  I  am  come  to  assert  my  rights  which  also 
are  yours.  .  .  .  Soldiers,"  he  said,  turning  to  the  one  element 
that  really  felt  a  lively  longing  for  him,  "your  general  .  .  . 
who  was  raised  upon  your  bucklers  is  restored  to  you.  Come 
and  join  him!  Tear  down  those  colours  .  .  .  which  for 
twenty-five  years  have  served  to  mark  the  rallying  point  of 
France's  enemies." 

As  the  evening  came  he  rose  from  the  maps  he  had  spread 
on  the  ground  where  the  memorial  stone  stands  and  entered 
the  village  of  Cannes,  three  miles  away.  It  was  not  yet  the 
brilliant  and  populous  city  of  big  winter  hotels  and  splendid 
winter  villas,  which  English  sojourners  have  annexed  to  Eng- 
land and  where  in  token  of  their  conquest  they  have  set  up 


418     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

statues  of  Lord  Brougham,  King  Edward,  and  the  Duke 
of  Albany  and  laid  out  their  tennis  courts  and  golf 
links. 

The  Cannes  that  received  Napoleon  in  silence  is  still  there, 
however,  its  narrow,  dusky  streets  bending  about  the  foot  of 
Mt.  Chevalier.  Just  where  the  modern  city  joins  the  old 
town,  the  postoffice  now  rises  in  what  was  an  orchard  that 
JMareh  evening  when  a  cold  night  wind  blowing  through  the 
olive  trees  chilled  the  marrow  and  the  humour  of  the  Emperor 
as  he  shivered  by  his  bivouac  fire.  And  the  lamp  posts  of 
the  Rue  Bivouac  sufficiently  commemorate  that  second  halt- 
ing place  of  the  eagle  in  his  flight  ''from  steeple  to  steeple 
even  to  the  towers  of  Notre  Dame,"  as  one  of  the  proclama- 
tions announced. 

Camp  was  broken  at  midnight.  Some  time  afterward  the 
Emperor  mounted  his  horse  and,  leaving  the  little  village 
sleeping  in  the  dark  shadow  of  Mont  Chevalier,  he  rode  on 
in  the  night  up  the  1000-foot  slope  to  Grasse,  that  butterfly 
town  which  draws  its  sustenance  from  the  perfume  flowers 
that  cover  its  hillsides.  Day  was  peeping  over  the  Alpine 
heights  when  the  imperial  wayfarer  came  to  Grasse.  He 
chose  not  to  halt  in  the  town  and  passed  by  to  eat  his  break- 
fast in  a  field  above,  where,  enthroned  on  a  pile  of  knap- 
sacks, he  drank  his  coffee  and  munched  his  bread. 

Three  cypresses  mark  the  scene  of  that  imperial  dejeuner, 
the  scene  of  that  dawning  of  the  Hundred  Days.  Nature 
could  hardly  set  a  prettier  table  than  in  that  grassy  meadow 
by  the  three  slender,  graceful  trees.  A  beautiful  cascade 
purls  its  headlong  way  over  the  brow  of  a  sheer  cliff.  Far 
below,  the  old  cathedral  of  Grasse  lifts  its  grizzled  tower 
while  a  lovely  blooming  vale  opens  a  vista  clear  to  the  Gulf 
Juan. 

The  reception  of  the  returned  monarch  thus  far  had  been 
only  coldly  civil.  The  people  living  on  and  near  the  coast 
had  viewed  afar  the  glory  of  his  military  campaigns,  but 
they  had  not  been  witnesses  to  any  of  his  victories.  On  the 
contrary,  they  remembered  his  reign  chiefly  as  an  era  when 
their  harbours  were  sealed,  and  when  they  could  not  look 


THE  RETURN  FROM  ELBA  419 

across  their  watery  frontier  without  beholding  a  British  sea 
wolf  prowling  along  the  horizon. 

Napoleon  did  not  deceive  himself.  He  knew  that  the  peo- 
ple as  a  whole  did  not  want  him  back  any  more  than  they 
wished  him  to  stay  when  they  hooted  him  out  of  Provence, 
less  than  a  year  before.  It  was  in  his  distrust  of  the  popular 
temper  that  he  had  chosen  to  begin  his  march  on  Paris  by  a 
narrow  path  through  the  wild  and  sparsely  populated  moun- 
tains rather  than  by  the  broad  highway  up  the  populous  val- 
ley of  the  Rhone.  He  chose  the  hazards  offered  by  nature 
rather  than  to  contend  with  human  obstacles. 

As  the  Emperor  looked  up  at  the  Basses  Alpes,  which  rose 
before  him  in  his  chosen  pathway  to  the  throne,  he  foresaw 
the  difficulty  of  dragging  his  artillery  over  those  heights  and 
he  ordered  that  it  be  abandoned.  There  were  only  four  can- 
non all  told  and  he  knew  that  their  little  whiff  of  grapeshot 
would  not  conquer  Paris  for  him  this  time.  Not  those  four 
cannon,  but  the  three-cornered  hat  and  the  old  grey  coat  must 
be  relied  on  to  break  the  ranks  and  silence  the  battery  of  the 
army  of  180,000  men,  sworn  to  defend  Louis  XVIII  on  the 
throne  of  his  fathers. 

AVhen  he  left  Grasse,  therefore,  it  was  to  enter  upon 
hardly  more  than  a  goat  path,  along  which  he  hastened  his 
little  band  in  single  file  through  snow  and  ice  and  in  peril 
of  frightful  abysses. 

That  night  the  imperial  bed  was  only  a  bundle  of  straw 
in  a  wretched,  solitary  cottage  near  the  village  of  Seranon. 
The  next  day  the  march  was  by  the  chateau  of  Castellane  to 
Bareme,  which  was  reached  in  a  heavy  snowstorm.  All  that 
had  been  saved  from  the  money  taken  to  Elba  amounted  to 
$350,000,  and  it  was  carried  on  the  backs  of  mules.  One  of 
the  animals  falling  had  scattered  over  the  snow  $60,000  in 
gold,  a  third  of  which  was  lost  beyond  recovery. 

After  a  night  at  Bareme,  the  Emperor  descended  to  the 
valley  of  the  Bleone,  where  it  grudgingly  widens  barely 
enough  to  accommodate  the  picturesque  old  provincial  capi- 
tal of  the  department  of  the  Basses  Alpes.  There,  at  Digne, 
he   found   a   welcoming  friend   in   the   bishop,    who   was   a 


420     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

brother  of  General  Miollis  and  who  was  only  a  poor  cure 
when,  at  the  General's  request,  Napoleon  had  elevated  him 
to  the  bishopric. 

The  bishop  sleeps  now  behind  the  high  altar  of  his  cathe- 
dral at  Digne;  but  he  lives  in  the  saintly  character  of  Mon- 
sig-neur  Bienvenu  in  *'Les  Miserables."  For  it  was  upon  a 
kindness  of  the  bishop  of  Digne  toward  a  man  who  had  tried 
to  rob  him  that  Victor  Hugo  built  the  character  of  Jean 
Valjean. 

After  rescuing  the  thief  from  crime,  the  cure  sent  him  to 
serve  in  Egypt  under  his  brother.  General  Miollis.  According 
to  the  local  legend,  the  veteran  was  in  Digne  again  when  Na- 
poleon came  along  on  his  march  from  exile  and  he  followed 
the  Emperor  to  Paris  and  to  Waterloo,  where  he  perished  on 
the  field.  "Jean  Valjean"  therefore  will  have  to  be  enrolled 
as  one  of  the  four  recruits  whom  history  records  as  having 
rallied  to  the  imperial  eagles  in  the  course  of  the  first  five 
days  of  the  march. 

From  Digne,  Napoleon  marched  to  Sisteron,  whose  fortress 
is  perched  upon  a  rock  at  the  head  of  the  Valley  of  the  Dur- 
ance. Nature  made  it  so  difficult  to  get  around  this  citadel 
that  modem  engineers  gave  up  the  problem  and  the  railroad 
to-day  dodges  under  the  fort.  From  its  loopholes  a  few  guns 
could  have  turned  back  the  advancing  Emperor,  but  the  Bour- 
bon army  officers  were  watching  for  him  over  in  the  valley 
of  the  Rhone.  There  was  not  a  musket  to  challenge  him  at 
Sisteron,  whence  he  rode  away  on  a  wave  of  cheers  and  with 
many  gifts  of  horses,  wagons  and  provisions.  There,  at  the 
threshold  of  Dauphiny,  he  was  leaving  behind  him  the  un- 
sympathetic people  of  the  seacoast  and  entering  among  the 
adventurous  mountaineers  who  loved  the  glory  of  arms  and 
who,  in  the  safety  of  their  fastnesses,  hated  the  foreigners 
that  had  overrun  the  plains  and  seated  their  Bourbon  pup- 
pet on  the  throne  of  France. 

It  was  on  that  5th  of  March  that  the  news  of  the  escape 
from  Elba  reached  the  congress  of  sovereigns  and  diplomats 
in  the  midst  of  their  jealous  map  making  at  Vienna,  and  that 
the  news  of  the  landing  at  Gulf  Juan  reached  Paris.    While 


THE  RETURN  FROM  ELBA  421 

the  Austrian  capital  was  trying  to  guess  whither  the  eagle 
had  flown,  the  officials  at  the  French  capital  engaged  in  plans 
for  his  capture.  The  Comte  d'Artois,  brother  of  Louis 
XVIII,  and  afterward  King  Charles  X,  started  at  once  for 
Lyons  to  stop  his  march  on  Paris,  and  a  proclamation  was 
issued,  authorising  any  one  to  take  him  dead  or  alive. 

In  the  heart  of  Dauphiny,  the  imposing  little  city  of 
Grenoble,  which  gloves  the  hands  of  France  and  millions  of 
other  hands  besides,  sits  by  the  bending  River  Isere,  gazing 
up  at  the  Alps,  whose  snowy  spurs  seem  to  rise  at  the  end 
of  every  street.  This  was  the  first  place  of  any  size  or  im- 
portance on  the  line  of  march  and  Napoleon  could  not  have 
but  wondered  how  fortune  would  greet  him  at  the  gate  of 
Grenoble.  That  prankish  goddess  did  not  wait  for  him  at 
the  gate.  In  her  eagerness  to  play  one  of  her  most  extraordi- 
nary pranks  she  went  forth  to  greet  him  when  he  was  yet 
fifteen  miles  away,  near  the  village  of  Laffrey. 

Laffrey  itself  is  a  mere  cluster  of  little  stone  cottages  that 
seem  to  have  rolled  like  boulders  from  the  flowered  hillsides 
down  into  the  narrow  ravine  through  which  the  high  road 
makes  its  way.  On  the  churchyard  wall  a  tablet  records  the 
words  with  which  in  a  breath  Napoleon  overturned  the 
Bourbon  throne. 

While  he  was  yet  a  mile  away  from  the  village  and  was 
riding  along  the  ravine  road,  with  the  white  mantle  of  the 
Grande  Chartreuse  looming  before  him,  he  saw  a  battalion 
of  infantry  from  Grenoble  blocking  his  way.  There  at  last 
the  lilies  confronted  the  bees.  The  Emperor  saw  that  the 
hour  had  struck  for  him  to  put  his  fate  to  the  touch  to  gain 
or  lose  it  all.  And  he  sent  one  of  his  aides  galloping  ahead 
to  cry  out  that  the  Emperor  w^as  approaching. 

As  a  Bourbon  officer  saw  a  little  man  in  a  grey  coat  and 
three-cornered  hat,  advancing  afoot  and  alone  along  the 
road,  he  shouted  to  the  soldiers,  ' '  There  he  is !  Fire ! ' ' 
But  the  soldiers,  with  bayonets  drawn,  stood  motionless  as 
in  a  tableau  while  Napoleon  boldly  walked  up  to  them. 
When  he  was  but  a  few  paces  away,  the  familiar  tones  of  his 
voice  rang  out  upon  the  tense  silence,  as  he  cried : 


422  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

"Soldiers!  I  am  your  Emperor!  Do  you  not  recognise 
me?" 

"Yes!  Yes!  Yes!"  hundreds  of  voices  responded  with  a 
fervent  shout. 

Now  unbuttoning  his  grey  coat,  he  offered  his  breast  to 
their  muskets  as  he  challenged  them:  "If  there  is  one 
among  you  who  would  shoot  his  general,  here  I  am ! ' ' 

"Vive  I'Empereur!"  rose  in  a  shriek  from  the  ranks. 
The  soldiers  lifted  their  bayonets  only  to  place  their  shakos 
on  them  and  wave  them  in  the  air.  Rushing  upon  the  Em- 
peror, they  covered  his  hands  with  kisses  and  filled  his  ears 
with  endearing  names. 

"It  is  all  settled!"  Napoleon  smiled  to  his  staff  out  of  the 
midst  of  the  soldiers.  "In  ten  days  we  shall  be  in  the 
Tuileries. ' ' 

With  the  cheering  battalion  leading  the  march,  the  Em- 
peror entered  Laffrey  village,  where  he  received  another  re- 
cruit. This  was  a  rich  glove  manufacturer  of  Grenoble,  Jean 
Demoulin,  who  brought  in  his  arms  a  gift  of  $20,000  in  gold. 

The  snowball  was  now  growing  very  fast.  At  the  next 
village  a  Bourbon  regiment,  which  was  marching  out  from 
Grenoble  under  Colonel  Labedoyere,  came  only  to  fall  in  with 
the  battalion  behind  the  Emperor. 

Thenceforth  the  perplexing  question  before  the  Bourbons 
was  whether  it  were  better  to  hurry  the  soldiers  away  from 
his  magic  and  abandon  the  road  to  him  or  risk  the  loss  of  both 
the  army  and  the  country. 

The  people  of  Grenoble  were  watching  for  the  Emperor 
from  their  walls  when  he  appeared  before  that  city,  and  they 
welcomed  him  with  ringing  cheers.  The  Bourbon  officials 
before  taking  flight  had  locked  the  gate,  which  the  citizens 
within  and  the  soldiers  without  quickly  battered  down.  The 
Emperor  rode  in  over  the  debris  and  went  to  the  Inn  of  the 
Three  Dauphins,  where  he  settled  himself  in  a  room  which  is 
preserved  in  the  present  Hotel  Moderne  et  des  Trois  Dau- 
phins. There  the  people  soon  came  and  called  him  out  upon 
the  balcony,  when  their  spokesman  explained  that  since  they 


THE  EETURN  FROM  ELBA  423 

were  unable  to  present  to  him  the  keys  of  his  good  city  of 
Grenoble,  they  had  brought  him  the  gate  itself! 

The  campaign  was  already  won.  ''Until  Grenoble  I  was 
an  adventurer,"  Napoleon  said.  ''But  after  Grenoble  I  was 
a  prince!" 

As  he  moved  upon  Lyons,  the  Comte  d'Artois  made  ready 
to  resist  his  progress.  When,  however,  the  Count  found  that 
the  soldiers  refused  to  cry  "Vive  le  Roi,"  he  prudently  left 
the  command  to  Marshal  Macdonald,  who  strove  loyally  to 
erect  batteries  for  the  defence  of  the  city.  When  at  a  shout 
of  "Vive  I'Empereur"  the  soldiers  began  pulling  down  the 
works  they  had  only  just  raised,  the  marshal  put  spurs  to  his 
horse  and  raced  away  as  if  fearing  to  catch  the  infection. 

Napoleon  entered  Lyons  and  sat  down  there  to  issue  his 
imperial  decrees  and  recast  the  government  of  France.  On 
the  same  day,  the  Allies  in  the  Vienna  Congress  were  denounc- 
ing him  as  outside  the  pale  of  civilisation  and  delivering  him 
up  "to  public  vengeance  as  the  enemy  and  disturber  of  the 
world's  repose," 

Only  one  more  barrier  now  lay  between  the  Emperor  and 
his  throne.  Marshal  Ney  had  been  despatched  by  the  Bour- 
bon government  to  assemble  its  scattered  army  and  capture 
the  invader  of  the  realm.  The  marshal  not  only  promised 
to  take  him,  but  to  bring  him  back  in  an  iron  cage.  When 
some  one  suggested  it  would  be  safer  to  kill  him  outright, 
Ney  insisted  that  it  would  be  more  exemplary  to  exhibit  him 
to  the  people  of  Paris. 

Once  among  his  soldiers,  however,  the  marshal  heard  again 
the  old  cheer  for  the  Emperor.  Soon  he  received  the  Emper- 
or's command  to  join  him,  with  the  promise  that  he  would 
greet  him  "as  on  the  morn  of  the  battle  of  the  ^loslrv'a" — 
where  he  had  invested  him  with  his  princely  title.  After  a 
painful  and  tumultuous  conflict  in  his  bosom,  the  simple  sol- 
dier plunged  into  the  tide  and  announced  to  his  army :  "I  am 
now  about  to  take  you  to  the  immortal  phalanx  which  the 
Emperor  is  leading  to  Paris." 

After  that  it  was  idle  for  the  Bourbons  to  attempt  any 


424  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

further  resistance.  The  truth  of  the  situation  was  expressed 
in  a  jesting  placard  fastened  to  the  Vendome  column:  "Na- 
poleon to  Louis  XVIII:  My  good  brother,  it  is  useless  to 
send  me  more  troops ;  I  already  have  enough ! ' ' 

The  King  saw  his  throne  for  which  he  had  waited  in  exile 
twenty  years,  sinking  beneath  him  as  if  in  a  quicksand. 
The  Emperor  was  near  Fontainebleau,  when  a  torchbearer 
lighted  Louis  out  of  the  Tuileries  at  midnight  of  Palm  Sun- 
day. For  hours  afterward,  the  great  palace  remained  de- 
serted while  Paris,  unmoved,  silently  looked  on  at  the  sud- 
denly shifting  scene. 

Again  Napoleon  drove  into  Cour  de  France,  but  this  time 
to  review  a  triumphant  army  where  only  a  few  months  be- 
fore he  had  sat  amid  the  wreckage  of  his  Empire.  At  nine 
o'clock  that  evening  a  carriage,  with  a  regiment  of  cavalry  as 
its  escort,  dashed  through  the  rain  and  fog  into  the  court- 
yard of  the  Tuileries.  The  coach  door  was  pulled  open,  the 
Emperor  was  snatched  from  his  seat  and,  with  a  smile  on  his 
lips  and  with  tears  on  his  cheeks,  was  carried  up  the  grand 
stairway  of  the  palace. 


CHAPTER  XLVIII 

THE  HUNDRED  DAYS 

1815     AGE  45 

THE  Hundred  Days  stand  alone  in  history.  Historians 
hardly  know  whether  to  dignify  that  brief,  but  ex- 
traordinary, period  as  an  epoch  or  dismiss  it  as  an 
episode.  Surely  no  other  fifteen  weeks  in  the  chronology  of 
the  world  can  equal  in  dramatic  interest  those  which  began 
with  the  return  from  Elba  in  March,  1815,  and  ended  with 
the  battle  of  Waterloo  in  June. 

As  the  King  ran  out  one  door  of  the  Tuileries  and  the 
Emperor  ran  in  the  other,  it  was  a  simple  matter  to  tear 
away  the  lilies  that  had  been  stitched  over  the  bees  on  the 
palace  tapestries.  The  violet  also  had  become  a  symbol  of 
allegiance  to  the  Emperor.  It  was  in  bloom  when  he  left  for 
Elba,  and  the  legend  grew  that  he  had  promised  to  return 
when  the  violets  bloomed  again.  The  faithful,  who  in  secret 
waited  and  longed  for  the  restoration  of  the  Empire,  fondly 
toasted  the  exiled  monarch  as  "Father  Violet,"  or  "Cor- 
poral Violet;"  songs  were  sung  to  "le  Pere  de  la  Violette," 
and  the  flower  was  worn  when  it  would  have  been  treason  to 
wear  a  red,  white  and  blue  ribbon. 

With  the  return  from  Elba  and  the  fulfilment  of  the 
prophecy  in  the  legend,  the  women  of  Paris  wore  huge 
bunches  of  violets  and  trimmed  their  morning  caps  with 
them,  while  the  jewellers  hastened  to  manufacture  violet  pins 
and  brooches.  On  the  other  hand,  women  who  were  un- 
swerving royalists  dared  not  open  a  floral  war  and  pit  the 
lily  against  the  violet ;  but  they  wore  with  impunity  eighteen 
tucks  in  their  skirts  as  a  sign  of  their  loyalty  to  the  fugitive 
Louis  XVIII. 

425 


426     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  people  who  loafed  about  the  throne  recanted  their 
solemn  oaths  of  allegiance  and  their  political  principles  as 
swiftly  as  they  changed  their  ribbons  and  their  boutonnieres. 
The  Emperor  himself  exclaimed,  as  he  saw  the  politicians  and 
generals  who  less  than  a  year  before  had  hastened  to  desert 
his  fallen  fortunes  equally  quick  now  to  forsake  the  fleeing 
King,  "Just  like  mankind!  One  must  laugh  at  them  to  keep 
from  crying  ! ' ' 

He  knew  that  he  had  been  placed  on  the  throne  again  by 
a  mere  military  revolution,  and  that  only  a  few  thousand 
men,  all  told,  had  taken  part  in  the  movement.  The  nation 
had  been  only  a  looker-on.  "The  people  have  let  me  come," 
he  frankly  admitted,  "just  as  they  let  the  others  go." 

The  French  were  no  longer  Bourbon  or  Bonapartist,  and 
the  heart  of  the  rended  nation  wished  a  plague  on  both 
their  houses.  The  people  were  sick  of  glory  purchased  with 
blood  and  longed  only  for  liberty  and  peace. 

Amid  all  the  rapid  changes  which  the  men  who  flocked 
about  him  were  undergoing,  the  Emperor  announced  that 
he,  too,  had  changed.  He  renounced  his  dream  of  conquest, 
and  declared  to  the  allied  nations  who  had  denounced  him  as 
an  outlaw  that  he  accepted  finally  and  forever  the  narrow 
frontiers  within  which  they  had  shut  France.  At  the  same 
time,  he  ordered  that  a  free  constitution  be  drawn  up. 

The  efforts  of  the  Emperor,  however,  to  establish  relations 
with  the  nations  of  Europe  were  met  on  every  hand  with 
scornful  rebuffs.  The  Congress  of  Vienna  had  only  just  fin- 
ished recasting  the  map  of  Europe  when  he  returned  to  the 
continent.  The  consternation  caused  by  his  apparition  was 
succeeded  by  a  united  determination  to  beat  him  down.  The 
armed  coalition  of  1813-14  was  renewed  and  plans  adopted 
for  reopening  the  campaign  with  800,000  troops.  France  was 
cut  off  from  the  world,  her  ships  being  seized  the  moment 
they  ventured  out  of  port,  and  her  trade  and  her  mails  were 
blockaded  on  every  road  that  crossed  the  frontier. 

Not  only  was  Europe  united  against  Napoleon  as  never  be- 
fore, but  France  for  the  first  time  was  divided  in  her  sup- 
port of  him.     Although  it  was  he  who  had  sent  up  the  na- 


THE  HUNDRED  DAYS  427 

tional  securities  from  twelve  francs  to  ninety-three,  his  re- 
turn to  power  now  caused  a  panic  in  the  stock  market. 
When  the  corps  legislatif  was  elected  after  his  return,  five- 
sixths  of  its  members  were  unsympathetic  and  that  body  made 
haste  to  declare  its  independence  of  the  Emperor.  The  coun- 
try responded  as  indifferently  to  his  military  as  to  his  political 
measures.  With  all  the  efforts  he  put  forth  to  raise  up  an 
army  of  national  defence,  it  is  doubtful  if  he  obtained  more 
than  50,000  effective  recruits  in  the  course  of  the  Hundred 
Days. 

With  these  and  the  troops  he  inherited  from  Louis  XVIII, 
he  had  not  quite  200,000  soldiers  available  for  service  early 
in  June.  Already  there  were  more  than  200,000  of  the  Allies 
in  Belgium,  150,000  Russians  and  210,000  Austrians  on  the 
march  across  Germany,  and  80,000  Austrians  and  Italians 
threatening  an  invasion  by  the  Mediterranean  coast.  With 
the  Russian  contingent,  far  more  than  half  a  million  men 
were  in  the  field  against  him  and  his  200,000. 

He  debated  for  a  time  whether  to  make  an  offensive  or  de- 
fensive campaign,  whether  to  attempt  a  Napoleonic  surprise 
and  fall  upon  an  unprepared  and  divided  enemy  or  to  take 
his  stand  at  the  gates  of  Paris  and  there  await  the  invading 
forces. 

Finally  the  more  aggressive  and  more  characteristic  policy 
was  adopted.  Probably  the  truth  is,  Napoleon  dared  not 
trust  the  loyalty  of  France  in  a  war  on  her  own  soil,  and  that 
when  he  went  forth  to  meet  the  Allies  beyond  the  frontier,  he 
sought  a  quick  victory  as  much  for  its  effect  on  the  French 
people  as  upon  the  enemy. 

Even  as  he  was  going  to  the  front,  he  was  made  to  feel  how 
perilous  was  his  position  at  home.  The  English  having 
landed  some  muskets  and  ammunition  on  the  coast  of  Brit- 
tany, the  tocsin  of  civil  war  was  rung  again  in  Bourbon 
Vendee.  To  stamp  out  that  insurrection  beliind  him,  the 
Emperor  had  to  detach  some  20,000  soldiers — 20,000  men  who 
otherwise  might  have  been  at  Waterloo ! 

The  Allies  were  fooled  by  the  same  old  trick  that  Napo- 
leon had  successfully  played  at  the  opening  of  nearly  all  his 


428     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

wars.  The  Duke  of  Wellington  and  Marshal  Bliicher,  com- 
manding the  allied  forces  in  Belgium,  contented  themselves 
with  watching  him  in  Paris  and  did  not  take  the  trouble  to 
watch  his  army.  As  they  saw  him  holding  reviews  of  raw, 
unarmed  militia  in  the  courtyard  of  the  Tuileries,  or  deliv- 
ering orations  to  the  corps  legislatif,  they  left  their  armies 
carelessly  dispersed  all  over  the  Belgian  country,  while  they 
waited  to  open  a  great  campaign  against  Paris  when  the  Aus- 
trians  and  Russians  should  have  crossed  the  Ehine. 

"Bonaparte  will  not  attack  us,"  Bliicher  wrote  his  wife 
early  in  June.  Even  when  the  French  army  stood  at  the 
frontier,  poised  for  a  spring  upon  the  scattered  British, 
Dutch  and  Germans,  and  the  Emperor  was  fairly  flying  to 
the  front,  Wellington  wrote,  "I  judge  from  his  speech  to  the 
corps  legislatif  that  his  departure  is  not  likely  to  be  imme- 
diate." That  letter  was  penned  just  five  days  before  the 
Battle  of  Waterloo ! 

Napoleon  had  already  stolen  out  of  Paris  at  dawn  of  June 
12  and  he  was  at  Laon  in  less  than  twelve  hours.  On  the 
14th,  he  joined  his  army  at  Beaumont,  the  last  French  town 
on  the  road  to  Charleroi,  Waterloo,  and  Brussels.  The 
Belgian  frontier  was  passed  before  sunrise  on  the  15th  and 
the  crossing  of  the  River  Sambre  began  at  noon.  Riding 
into  Charleroi,  the  Emperor  sat  down  in  a  chair  at  the  fork 
of  the  Brussels  and  Ligny  roads  and  fell  into  a  sound  sleep. 
He  had  been  travelling  from  Paris  night  and  day,  and  had 
been  in  the  saddle  seven  hours  that  morning.  Even  the 
cheers  of  the  passing  battalions,  the  blaring  of  trumpeters 
and  the  beating  of  drums  did  not  awaken  him  as  his  army 
marched  by. 

While  he  sat  there,  Ney  came  up  and  presented  himself 
for  service.  The  Emperor  had  so  reluctantly  and  tardily 
summoned  him  that  the  mairshal  could  not  join  the  army 
earlier.  Even  now  he  received  a  cool  welcome,  and  was  dis- 
missed with  the  command,  "Go  drive  the  enemy  along  the 
Brussels  road  and  take  up  your  position  at  Quatre  Bras." 

The  problem  of  the  campaign  on  both  sides  was  brutally 
simple.     Wellington,   still   at  Brussels,  was  in  command  of 


THE  HUNDRED  DAYS  429 

35,000  British,  45,000  Germans  and  25,000  Dutch  and  Bel- 
gians— an  army  of  about  105,000  men.  Bliicher,  now  march- 
ing from  Namur,  had  an  array  of  about  117,000  Prussians. 
If  the  two  armies  should  unite,  they  would  have  a  total  of 
222,000  men,  including  175,000  infantry  and  25,000  cavalry, 
supported  by  more  than  500  guns. 

Napoleon,  on  the  other  hand,  had  been  able  to  bring  up 
only  125,000  men,  including  90,000  infantry,  22,000  cavalry 
and  10,000  artillery,  with  less  than  350  guns.  Plainly,  Well- 
ington and  Bliicher  must  be  kept  apart  if  the  125,000  French 
were  to  have  any  chance  to  win. 

That  night  of  the  15th  while  Ney,  in  front  of  Quatre  Bras, 
was  held  in  check  only  by  some  Dutch  battalions,  Welling- 
ton and  his  officers  were  at  the  Duchess  of  Richmond's  ball, 
whose  sound  of  revelry  in  Belgium's  capital,  Byron  has  sent 
echoing  down  the  corridor  of  time.  There  in  the  midst  of 
fair  women  and  brave  men,  dance  orders  contended  with 
battle  orders  until  three  o'clock  in  the  morning  of  the  16th, 
when  the  British  commander,  becoming  once  more  the  Iron 
Duke,  started  for  the  front  after  gentle  fingers  had  buckled 
on  his  sword. 

The  first  necessity  of  the  Allies  was  to  unite  their  forces. 
The  Prussians  already  were  hurrying  along  the  road  from 
Namur,  when  Wellington  hastily  proceeded  to  concentrate 
his  contingent  at  Quatre  Bras  on  the  Charier oi-Brussels 
highway. 

For  the  purpose  of  concerting  measures,  the  Duke  and 
Bliicher  met  late  in  that  forenoon  of  the  16th  at  a  windmill 
near  Ligny.  As  the  two  allied  commanders  sat  there  on  that 
eminence,  Napoleon  in  the  midst  of  his  staff  sat  beside  an- 
other mill  on  another  hill  only  a  little  way  across  the  wheat 
fields.  Between  the  two  mills  flows  a  little  brook,  the  Ligne, 
and  on  its  banks  was  a  little  cluster  of  houses,  the  hamlet  of 
Ligny. 

Even  as  Wellington  galloped  away  toward  Quatre  Bras,  he 
could  see  the  French  moving  down  upon  Ligny  for  the  pur- 
pose of  stopping  the  Prussian  advance  westward.  Unlike 
the  thunderbolt  he  was  in  other  and  earlier  days,  however, 


430     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Napoleon  had  hesitated  and  withheld  the  blow  until  Bliicher 
was  enabled  to  assemble  nearly  90,000  men  against  the  70,000 
he  himself  could  put  in  the  battle. 

All  afternoon  the  French  artillery  poured  its  deadly  hail 
upon  the  Prussian  masses  that  held  the  slope  beyond  the  vil- 
lage, while  the  infantry  of  the  two  armies  trampled  the  grain 
fields  and  wrestled  at  bayonet  length  in  the  narrow,  winding 
lanes,  in  the  churchyard,  in  the  barnyards  and  within  the 
very  cottage  walls  of  Ligny.  Then  in  the  waning  of  a  day 
of  sulphurous  heat,  the  warring  forces  of  the  air  burst  into 
battle.  Lightning  flashes  shot  across  the  dark  heavens; 
salvos  of  thunder  shook  the  heavy  atmosphere;  the  leaden 
skies  opened  and  the  floods  descended  upon  the  embattled 
armies. 

Under  cover  of  those  bewildering  flashes  and  crashes  of 
Jove's  artillery,  the  Emperor  led  forth  the  Old  Guard  and 
they  leaped  the  brook  and  snatched  the  village.  Bliicher 's 
horse  was  shot  from  under  him,  and  he  was  only  saved  from 
capture  by  the  timely  appearance  of  a  squadron  of  Uhlans. 
The  Old  Guard  swept  on  irresistibly  over  Ligny  and  up  the 
slope  to  the  windmill,  leaving  a  path  through  the  Prussian 
centre  and  the  enemy's  army  broken  in  pieces. 

Perhaps  15,000  Prussians  and  11,000  French  lay  dead  or 
wounded  on  that  field  of  Napoleon's  last  victory  in  battle. 
For  as  Toulon  was  written  at  the  top  of  the  red  roll  of  his 
victories,  so  Ligny  is  inscribed  at  the  bottom. 

The  Emperor  went  to  sleep  that  night  in  the  chateau  of 
Fleuris,  congratulating  himself  that  he  had  opened  his  cam- 
paign with  a  blow  as  crushing  as  that  of  Jena.  But  there 
was  a  fatal  difference.  While  he  was  winning  the  Battle  of 
Jena,  Davout  was  winning  the  Battle  of  Auerstadt,  twelve 
miles  away.  Now,  while  he  had  been  winning  the  Battle  of 
Ligny,  Ney  had  lost  the  battle  of  Quatre  Bras,  seven  miles 
away. 

There,  with  an  irresolution  foreign  to  his  impetuous  temper 
in  his  prime,  the  marshal  had  dallied  with  the  hours  until 
he  was  heavily  outnumbered.  He  was  seized  with  the  frenzy 
of  desperation  when  he  saw  the  day  slipping  away  from  him 


THE  HUNDRED  DAYS  431 

and  recollected  the  Emperor's  message  to  him  in  the  morn- 
ing, ''The  fate  of  France  is  in  your  hands."  He  well  knew 
that  his  own  fate  also  was  at  stake.  Having  first  deserted 
Napoleon  in  1814,  and  now  the  Bourbons  in  1815,  the  hap- 
less marshal  fought  "wath  a  halter  round  his  neck,"  and, 
waving  his  sword  like  a  madman,  he  cried  out  for  the  Eng- 
lish bullets  to  deliver  him  from  his  despair.  When  night 
fell,  Wellington  still  held  the  road  to  Brussels — and  Waterloo ! 

Napoleon,  however,  confident  that  he  had  put  the  Prussians 
out  of  action  and  could  dispose  of  Wellington  singly  and  at 
his  leisure,  took  his  ease  the  next  day,  the  17th — the  day  be- 
fore Waterloo !  He  felt  sure  that  the  Allies  were  hopelessly 
separated,  and  that  the  rended  Prussian  army  was  in  a  re- 
treat on  its  bases  of  supply  at  Liege  and  Namur. 

He  breakfasted  unusually  late,  and  it  was  not  until  eleven 
o'clock  that  he  ordered  Marshal  Grouchy  to  take  33,000  men 
and  115  guns  and  pursue  Bliicher.  "While  I  march  against 
the  English,"  he  said,  "you  will  pursue  the  Prussians." 

Grouchy  objected  that  it  was  too  late  for  him  to  take  up 
the  pursuit  of  an  army  that  had  started  more  than  twelve 
hours  ahead  of  him.  The  Emperor,  however,  cut  him  short, 
and  sent  the  marshal  and  his  33,000  men  away,  never  to  see 
them  again. 

Meanwhile  Wellington  at  Quatre  Bras  was  receiving  word 
that  the  Prussians  were  by  no  means  retiring  from  the  cam- 
paign, but  were  moving  northward  by  the  nearest  available 
road  to  Brussels.  The  Duke,  therefore,  ordered  his  own 
force  to  fall  back  in  the  hope  of  uniting  with  the  Prussians 
farther  north.  Thus  in  the  afternoon  of  the  17th,  the  Allies 
were  marching  by  parallel  roads  only  eight  and  ten  miles 
apart. 

When  Napoleon  came  in  sight  of  Quatre  Bras,  Wellington 
was  gone,  and  only  a  rear  guard  remained.  Lord  Uxbridge, 
the  commander  of  the  rear  guard,  saw  him  appear  on  the 
crest  of  a  ridge,  a  perfect  silhouette  against  the  sky,  and 
cried  to  his  gunners:  ''Fire,  and  aim  welL"  But  they 
missed  the  mark. 

With  Napoleon  and  his  Guard  at  the  heels  of  Uxbridge 's 


432  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

rear  guard,  there  began  a  wild  chase  along  the  Brussels  road. 
Another  afternoon  storm  beat  down  upon  them  as  pursued 
and  pursuers,  dripping  wet,  raced  from  hamlet  to  hamlet. 
The  Emperor,  in  a  fury  of  impatience,  shouted:  ''Fire! 
Fire !  Fire !  They  are  English  ! ' '  For  it  was  the  iirst  time 
since  Toulon,  twenty-one  years  before,  that  he  had  come  in 
sight  of  a  red  coat. 

At  half-past  six  of  a  cloudy,  foggy  evening,  the  Emperor, 
with  the  rain  streaming  down  him,  came  to  a  rude,  one-story 
roadside  cottage,  whose  proud  owner  had  celebrated  his 
matrimonial  alliance  with  the  belle  of  the  countryside  by 
naming  it  "La  Belle  Alliance."  Out  of  the  darkness  in 
front  of  him  he  heard  the  cannon  of  the  enemy.  Was  it  only 
Uxbridge  who  was  firing?  Or  were  Wellington  and  his 
army  out  there  in  the  night,  preparing  to  stand  for  battle  on 
the  morrow? 

To  solve  the  doubt  he  ordered  several  of  his  field  batteries 
to  open  fire.  And  Wellington  answered  with  a  roaring 
cannonade. 

The  doubt  was  resolved.  Napoleon  had  arrived  at  the 
trysting  place  of  fate,  and  soon  he  saw  the  camp  fires  of  the 
British  army  flaring  in  the  blackness  of  the  stormy,  cheerless 
night  that  covered  with  its  pall  the  field  of  Waterloo. 


CHAPTER  XLIX 

WATERLOO 

JUNE   15,    1815     AGE  45 

NATURE  played  a  dreary  and  fitting  overture  the  night 
before  the  battle  of  Waterloo.  The  skies  opened  wide, 
and  the  140,000  soldiers  of  Napoleon  and  Wellington, 
without  a  tent  to  shelter  them  from  the  almost  incessant 
downpour,  slept  on  the  sodden  earth  or  stood  in  groups  and 
drowsed  on  one  another's  shoulders. 

The  Duke  of  Wellington  made  his  headquarters  in  a  house 
still  seen  and  a  room  still  shown  opposite  the  church  in  the 
village  of  Waterloo,  while  his  adversary  stayed  in  a  large 
farmhouse,  Le  Caillou,  which  continues  to  present  its  stone 
gables  to  the  Charleroi-Brussels  road.  There,  lying  on  his 
iron  camp  bed,  beneath  a  gold  fringed,  silk  counterpane  and 
a  canopy  with  green  satin  curtains.  Napoleon  dreamed  his 
last  dream  of  victory. 

At  midnight,  a  courier  from  Marshal  Grouchy  came  drip- 
ping into  Le  Caillou  with  a  despatch  reporting  that  Bliicher, 
instead  of  retiring  from  the  campaign,  seemed  to  be  march- 
ing toward  Wavre,  and  that  if  this  should  prove  to  be  the 
case,  he,  too,  would  march  to  Wavre  in  order  to  keep  the  Prus- 
sians from  joining  the  British.  Although  the  courier  said 
that  an  answer  was  expected,  he  was  sent  away  without  any. 
Yet  one  inspiring  suggestion  then  to  the  uninspired  marshal 
might  have  made  Waterloo  spell  success. 

At  that  same  midnight  hour,  the  Prussians,  who  had  al- 
ready arrived  at  Wavre,  were  deciding  in  a  council  of  war 
to  join  the  British  at  once.  In  two  hours  more,  Wellington 
received  from  Bliicher  the  cheering  promise  of  help  and  he 
finally  determined  to  make  a  stand  at  Waterloo. 

While  the  Duke  was  reading  that  welcome  despatch  at  two 

433 


434     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

o'clock,  Napoleon  was  up  and  visiting  the  camp  of  his  rain- 
drenched  army.  Peering  through  the  shadows  of  the  star- 
less night,  he  traced  the  flaming  lines  of  the  enemy  and  the 
black  outline  of  the  Forest  of  Soignes  beyond. 

The  Emperor  never  ceased  to  express  his  amazement  that 
Wellington  should  have  risked  a  battle  with  his  back  to  that 
forest.  The  Duke,  on  the  other  hand,  always  insisted  that  its 
tall  and  well  separated  trees,  its  lack  of  underbrush  and  its 
many  woods  roads  offered  sufficient  facilities  for  the  retreat 
of  a  beaten  army. 

The  sun  of  Waterloo  rose  at  twelve  minutes  of  four  on  a 
Sunday  morning  in  June.  But  it  hid  its  face  behind  the 
weeping  clouds.  The  rain  soon  stopped,  however,  and  "at 
five  o'clock,"  so  he  dictated  at  St,  Helena,  "the  Emperor 
perceived  a  few  feeble  rays  of  that  sun  which  should  before 
setting  light  up  the  destruction  of  the  British  army." 

It  was  Napoleon's  habit  to  strike  early.  At  Montenotte, 
Austerlitz,  Jena  and  Wagram,  he  began  at  sunrise.  At 
Waterloo,  he  made  a  fatal  delay  on  the  advice  of  General 
Drouot,  who  asked  him  to  wait  for  the  ground  to  dry  so  that 
the  gun  carriages  could  be  more  readily  moved.  Ever  after, 
Drouot  lamented  that  but  for  him  the  Emperor  might  have 
attacked  Wellington  at  seven,  won  at  ten,  and  been  ready  for 
Bliicher  in  the  afternoon. 

The  British  were  promptly  in  line.  While  they  were 
forming  in  battle  array,  with  trumpets  blaring,  drums  beat- 
ing, and  bagpipes  wailing,  a  spirited  cavalcade  dashed  upon 
the  scene  from  the  direction  of  Waterloo  village.  It  was 
the  Duke  of  Wellington  seated  on  his  war  horse  "Copen- 
hagen," and  attended  by  his  staff,  including  the  Prince  of 
Orange,  the  Duke  of  Richmond  and  several  of  the  great 
nobles  of  Britain.  They  came  upon  the  battlefield  as  gaily 
as  they  would  ride  to  meet  the  hounds  in  a  quiet  English 
county.  Among  them  was  that  unfailing  Corsican  huntsman, 
Pozzo  di  Borgo,  who  had  chased  the  quarry  for  twenty  years 
and  all  over  the  fields  of  Europe. 

There  were  yet  no  heroes  in  khaki,  and  as  he  rode  his  lines, 
the  noble  Duke  was  apparelled  like  a  bridegroom.     His  cocked 


WATERLOO  435 

hat  sported  four  cockades  in  the  colours  of  England,  Spain, 
Portugal  and  the  Netherlands.  A  white  cravat  showed  un- 
der his  dark-blue  coat.  From  his  shoulders  a  short  blue 
cloak  floated  in  the  air,  and  his  buckskin  breeches  disappeared 
into  a  pair  of  high  tasselled  boots. 

At  eight  o'clock  Napoleon  was  still  leisurely  breakfasting 
at  Le  Caillou  on  silver  plate  brought  from  the  Tuileries. 
The  sun  was  shining,  and  a  wind  was  blowing  on  the  marshy 
field.  The  Emperor  was  supremely  confident  that  he  would 
breakfast  the  next  morning  in  Brussels.  "We  have  ninety 
chances  in  our  favour,  and  not  ten  against  us,"  he  declared. 

He  announced  that  he  would  hurl  Wellington  back  upon 
his  base  at  Ostend  or  at  Antwerp — drive  him  into  the  sea, 
as  he  expressed  it.  "I  shall  bring  my  numerous  artillery  into 
play,  charge  with  my  cavalry  and  then  I  shall  march  with 
my  Old  Guard."  He  had  no  thought  that  the  Prussians, 
whom  he  had  beaten  at  Ligny  two  days  before,  might  rally 
and  confront  him  again  that  day. 

Marshal  Soult  had  pressed  the  Emperor  the  night  before 
to  call  in  at  least  some  of  the  33,000  men  with  Grouchy,  and 
he  urged  the  point  anew  at  the  breakfast  table.  The  Em- 
peror only  scorned  his  prudence.  "Because  Wellington  has 
beaten  you,  you  regard  him  as  a  great  general,"  he  chided 
his  chief  of  staff.  "But  let  me  tell  3'ou  now  that  Welling- 
ton is  a  poor  general,  and  that  the  English  are  poor  soldiers, 
and  that  for  me  this  affair  here  is  no  more  than  eating  this 
breakfast." 

Thus  the  Emperor  sat  at  table,  routing  the  foe  with  knife 
and  fork,  while  his  troops  were  forming  on  the  heights  of 
La  Belle  Alliance.  It  was  about  nine  when  he  appeared  be- 
fore them  and  for  the  last  time  held  a  review  of  his  army. 

The  eagle  crowned  standards  fluttered  in  the  breeze.  The 
sun  gleamed  on  sabres  and  lances,  on  helmets  and  cuirasses 
and  lit  up  the  brilliant  medley  of  bright  red,  sky  blue  and 
deep  green  uniforms.  Plumes  of  all  the  rainbow  hues  nodded 
above  the  shakos,  the  tiger  helmets  and  huge  bearskin  caps. 
The  grenadiers  and  chasseurs  of  the  Old  Guard,  with  pow- 
dered queues  and  enormous  gold  earrings,  and  with  the  most 


436     LN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ferocious  moustaches  they  could  grow  or  even  paste  on  their 
lips,  carried  in  their  knapsacks  their  full-dress  uniforms  in 
readiness  for  a  triumphant  entry  into  Brussels  the  next  day. 

Dressed  in  his  long  grey  coat,  the  Emperor  rode  down  the 
frenzied  ranks  in  full  view  of  the  red  line  of  England,  less 
than  a  mile  away.  Wellington,  through  his  field  glasses, 
followed  the  imperial  progress,  and  the  cheers  of  the  French 
broke  in  ringing  waves  upon  the  British  front.  Not  a  shot 
was  fired  to  interrupt  the  imposing  spectacle,  more  like  a 
gala  entry  into  the  bull  ring  than  the  inauguration  of  a  battle 
for  the  mastery  of  Europe. 

The  stage  on  which  Napoleon  enacted  that  closing  scene  in 
the  pageantry  of  his  career  is  not  greatly  changed  after  the 
passing  of  a  century.  True,  the  Belgians  have  defaced  the 
field  by  heaping  up  an  enormous  mound  of  earth  200  feet 
high  and  placing  a  huge  lion  on  top  of  it.  Half  a  dozen  other 
more  modest  memorials  rise  here  and  there  and  the  ground 
is  more  or  less  cluttered  with  inns  and  shops.  The  wooded 
background  of  AVellington 's  army  has  vanished,  while  the 
sunken  road  has  half  disappeared,  and  now  a  tramway  runs 
along  it. 

Notwithstanding  these  latter-day  intrusions,  however,  the 
field  of  Waterloo  is  still  the  same  checkerboard  of  small, 
well-tended  farms,  dotted  with  the  same  villages,  as  when 
the  battle  burst  upon  it.  One  who  stands  to-day  on  La  Belle 
Alliance,  needs  to  put  forth  only  a  slight  effort  of  the 
imagination  to  call  back  the  shades  of  the  two  warring  armies, 
victor  and  vanquished,  and  see  them  again  facing  each  other 
in  serried  lines. 

Like  Austerlitz,  Waterloo  was  not  fought  in  Waterloo,  but 
two  and  three  miles  south  of  that  village,  which  itself  is  only 
ten  miles  out  of  Brussels.  And,  unlike  most  battles,  it  was 
not  for  the  possession  of  a  fortress,  a  river  or  a  mountain 
pass. 

It  was  a  fight  to  capture  a  country  wagon  road,  which,  like 
a  main  aisle,  runs  through  the  very  centre  of  the  battlefield. 
From  La  Belle  Alliance,  where  the  French  troops  were  drawn 
up,  this  road  dips  down  into  the  narrow,  tumbling  valley, 


WATERLOO  437 

which  divided  the  two  armies  on  the  battle  morning,  and 
ascends  the  opposite  height  to  Mt.  St.  Jean,  on  whose  southern 
slope  Wellington's  troops  awaited  the  advance  of  their  foe. 

By  being  the  first  on  the  scene  the  night  before,  the  Duke 
had  won  the  toss  for  the  choice  of  positions  and  he  exercised 
his  advantage  with  good  tactical  judgment.  He  well  knew 
where  he  was  going  when  he  retired  from  Quatre  Bras,  for 
he  had  examined  Mt.  St.  Jean  while  passing  by,  a  year  be- 
fore. The  original  discoverer  of  Waterloo,  however,  was,  of 
all  men,  Hudson  Lowe.  At  least  he  was  among  the  first  to 
commend  its  military  advantages. 

When  Wellington  posted  his  troops,  he  cleverly  took  ad- 
vantage of  everj^  favourable  condition  in  a  most  remarkable 
battlefield.  Down  close  to  the  foot  of  La  Belle  Alliance,  and 
at  the  western  end  of  this  tilting  ground  of  the  nations,  rise 
the  shattered  walls  of  the  old  chateau  of  Hougoumont. 
They  are  covered  with  wounds  and  the  very  trees  are  battle 
scarred.  Out  in  the  centre  beside  the  Brussels  road,  is  a 
group  of  buildings  within  a  high  stone  wall.  These  are  the 
farmhouse  and  sheds  of  La  Haye  Sainte.  At  the  eastern 
end  of  the  field  is  the  little  hamlet  of  Papelotte  with  two 
other  hamlets  near  by. 

Wellington  seized  upon  all  those  buildings,  garrisoned  them, 
cut  loopholes  in  them  and  turned  them  into  forts.  Thus  the 
stone  walls  of  Hougoumont  and  Papelotte  became  in  effect 
the  brass  knuckles  on  the  right  and  left  fists  of  John  Bull, 
while  La  Haye  Sainte  served  him  as  a  breastplate  in  his  finish 
fight  with  Napoleon.  For  it  was  behind  those  fortified  out- 
posts that  the  Briton  formed  his  battle  line,  which  stretched 
nearly  three  miles  from  west  to  east,  from  Hougoumont  to 
Papelotte,  with  La  Haye  Sainte  in  the  very  centre, 

Kot  only  did  Wellington  shield  his  troops  behind  that 
strange  chain  of  improvised  fortresses.  He  posted  them 
back  of  the  road  to  Wavre,  which  was  most  peculiarly  con- 
trived to  protect  them.  A  high,  thick  hedge  bordered  the 
easterly  reach  of  the  highway,  where  it  formed  a  good  screen, 
and  to  the  west  the  road  sank  fully  six  feet  below  the  field,  a 
perfect  intrenchment  ready  made. 


438  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Back  of  the  road,  the  Duke  stood  his  soldiers  on  the  slope 
of  Mt.  St.  Jean,  where  in  every  attack  the  enemy  had  an  up- 
hill task.  He  also  made  the  hill  serve  him  in  still  another 
way,  its  crest  snugly  sheltering  and  indeed  quite  concealing 
his  reserves  and  wounded. 

The  two  armies  were  not  very  unequal  in  numbers.  Al- 
though Wellington  used  to  say  that  Napoleon  on  the  battle- 
field was  worth  40,000  men,  the  Iron  Duke  himself  was  no 
small  reinforcement  to  any  army  he  commanded.  In  the  out- 
lines of  their  lives,  the  two  chieftains  were  strangely  matched. 
Both  were  born  on  conquered  islands  within  a  few  months 
of  each  other;  both  were  educated  in  French  military  schools 
at  the  same  time;  both  received  their  commissions  and  made 
their  first  campaigns  in  the  same  years.  Although  their 
paths  never  had  crossed  until  they  met  on  the  Brussels  road, 
the  Briton  had  for  six  years  fought  the  marshals  of  the  Na- 
poleonic school  in  Spain,  and  there,  in  1814,  the  Irishman 
was  winning  his  dukedom  while  the  Corsican  was  losing  his 
crown. 

Napoleon  had  a  few  more  and  Wellington  a  few  less  than 
70,000  troops.  The  most  marked  disparity  between  the  forces 
was  in  artillery,  the  Emperor  having  260  guns  against  the 
Duke's  180. 

While  Napoleon,  however,  was  well  satisfied  with  his  army, 
which  was  wholly  French  and  fiercely  patriotic,  Wellington 
described  his  own,  even  after  the  victory,  as  *'the  worst 
equipped  army  with  the  worst  staff  ever  brought  together." 
It  is  true  that  nearly  two-thirds  of  his  soldiers  were  untrained. 
The  rest  had  seen  more  or  less  active  service  in  the  Spanish 
campaign,  but  the  best  of  the  Peninsular  veterans  were  lost 
or  still  absent  on  the  New  Orleans  expedition. 

There  were  only  23,991  British,  all  told,  at  Waterloo,  just 
about  one-third  of  the  total  fighting  force.  More  than 
20,000  of  Wellington 's  men  were  from  Holland  and  Belgium, 
and  more  than  20,000  were  Hanoverians  and  mercenaries  from 
other  German  states. 

With  such  a  hodge-podge  army,  Wellington  would  not 
have  dared  fight  Napoleon  at  Waterloo  had  he  not  been  as- 


WATERLOO  439 

sured  that  another  army  larger  than  his  own  was  less  than 
ten  miles  away  and  hurrying  to  his  assistance.  While 
Grouchy,  with  his  33,000  French,  was  actually  marching 
farther  away  from  Napoleon,  Marshal  Bliicher,  "that  old 
devil,"  as  the  Emperor  called  his  most  persistent  and 
troublesome  foe  in  arms,  had  been  dragging  his  weary  Prus- 
sians through  the  mud  and  making  straight  for  Waterloo. 
Welling-ton  accepted  battle,  therefore,  on  the  confident  ex- 
pectation that  before  the  end  of  the  day,  he  would  outnum- 
ber his  adversary  two  to  one. 

Even  while  the  battle  was  beginning,  Grouchy  was  sending 
a  message  to  the  Emperor,  announcing  that  he  hoped  to  ar- 
rive at  Wavre  in  the  evening,  where  he  would  place  himself 
between  Bliicher  and  Wellington,  "who  is,  I  presume,  re- 
treating before  Your  Majesty!"  And  he  asked  what  he 
should  do  to-morrow.  He  did  not  know,  poor  plodding  mar- 
shal, that  Bliicher  was  fast  placing  himself  between  him  and 
Napoleon  and  that  there  would  be  no  to-morrow  for  the  army 
of  France. 

It  was  almost  noon  when  one  of  his  "beautiful  daughters," 
as  Napoleon  fondly  called  his  twelve-pounders,  tossed  the  ball 
that  signalised  the  opening  of  a  battle  of  untold,  unending 
consequences. 

That  first  outburst  of  thunder  from  the  batteries  on  La 
Belle  Alliance  was  for  the  purpose  of  covering  an  attack 
upon  Hougoumont,  which  Prince  Jerome  Bonaparte  led  with 
reckless  daring.  Out  of  the  loopholes  in  the  garden  walls 
of  the  chateau,  flames  of  fire  shot  into  the  faces  of  the  ad- 
vancing French  from  the  muskets  of  the  invisible  British 
garrison.  Twice  Jerome  and  his  12,000  men  dashed  heads 
down  into  the  blinding  storm.  When  retreat  was  sounded, 
after  a  costly  sacrifice,  the  bodies  of  the  dead  who  had  died 
in  vain  lay  in  heaps  about  the  stubborn  walls. 

The  Emperor  had  ordered  the  attack  merely  to  divert 
Wellington's  attention  from  the  British  centre  where  he  had 
meant  to  deal  his  hardest  blow.  But  while  he  was  yet  maldng 
ready  for  that  deadly  thrust,  he  discerned  a  cloud  of  dust  on 
the  eastern  horizon,  which  soon  took  the  shape  of  an  advanc- 


440     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

ing  column  of  troops.  Soon  a  scouting  party  brought  in  a 
captured  Prussian  courier,  with  a  message  to  the  British 
from  General  Biilow  of  Bliicher's  army  announcing  that  he 
was  marching  with  30,000  men  to  attack  the  right  wing  of 
the  French. 

Biilow,  however,  was  yet  a  long  way  off  and  when  the  Em- 
peror had  sent  a  courier  to  Grouchy,  ordering  him  to  come 
in  behind  Biilow,  who  would  thus  be  caught  between  two 
French  armies,  he  merely  revised  the  gambling  odds.  "This 
morning  we  had  ninety  points  in  our  favour,"  he  said;  "we 
still  have  sixty  against  forty."  He  did  not  calculate  that 
Bliicher,  too,  was  coming  upon  him.  Nor  did  he  know  that 
his  order  to  Grouchy  would  not  be  delivered  until  five  o'clock, 
too  late  to  be  of  any  use  even  had  the  absent  marshal  not 
been  hotly  engaged  at  that  hour  with  a  division  of  Prussians 
left  behind  at  Wavre. 

Returning  to  his  duel  with  Wellington,  Napoleon  now 
launched  his  bolt  at  the  British  centre.  It  was  one-thirty 
when  20,000  French,  under  a  protecting  sheet  of  flames  from 
eighty  guns,  raced  across  the  field,  the  standing  rye  falling 
before  them  as  before  a  reaping  machine.  A  detachment 
turned  aside  to  storm  La  Haye  Sainte  and  attempt  the  cap- 
ture of  that  stronghold,  while  the  great  body  of  advancing 
troops  started  up  the  slippery  side  of  St.  Jean.  Some  Dutch 
and  Belgians,  whom  "Wellington  had  posted  in  front,  broke 
and  fled  across  the  Wavre  road  and  broke  upon  the  British 
lines. 

As  the  French  mounted  the  muddy  slope  in  pursuit  of  the 
fleeing  enemy,  however,  they  themselves  became  a  confused 
mass.  Suddenly  the  British  sprang  up  from  their  ambuscade 
behind  the  roadside  hedges  and  fired  at  forty  paces.  Then 
came  a  savage  hand  to  hand  encounter  which  ended  in  the 
rout  of  the  French  column. 

At  the  same  time  another  attacking  column  met  its  sur- 
prise farther  along  where  the  road  suddenly  sank  below  the 
surface  of  the  field.  There  the  cuirassiers,  leading  the  right 
of  the  column,  unexpectedly  found  themselves  at  the  brink 


WATERLOO  441 

of  the  strange  declivity.  The  undaunted  horsemen  took  the 
leap  down  into  the  road,  but  as  they  were  spurring  their 
horses  up  the  opposite  bank,  they  saw  only  thirty  feet  before 
them,  a  body  of  British  Foot  Guards,  descending  at  a  furi- 
ous pace.  The  French  wheeled  and  tied  along  the  treacher- 
ous ravine  to  the  Brussels  road,  whence  they  escaped  from  the 
trap. 

Everywhere  up  and  down  the  field,  the  blue  line  of  France 
was  rolled  back,  and  Ponsonby's  brigade  made  a  return 
charge  up  the  side  of  La  Belle  Alliance.  There  the  traces  of 
forty  of  Napoleon's  cannon  were  cut  before  the  audacious 
Britons  could  be  beaten  back  by  the  French  lancers,  one  of 
whom  thrust  a  fatal  spear  into  the  breast  of  the  gallant  Pon- 
sonby. 

The  Emperor's  first  blow  had  utterly  failed.  After  three 
hours  and  a  half  of  fighting  the  contending  armies  were  in 
their  original  positions.  The  rye  field,  its  golden  yellow 
crimson-dyed,  had  become  a  graveyard.  But  the  red  line  of 
Britain  and  the  blood-drenched  walls  of  Hougoumont  and 
La  Haye  Sainte  had  all  withstood  the  onset. 

Napoleon,  nervously  pinching  his  snuff,  was  fully  aroused 
now  to  the  perils  that  were  fast  closing  in  upon  him.  He 
knew  that  the  Prussians  already  were  forming  behind  the 
screen  of  the  Wood  of  Paris  and  another  message  from 
Grouchy  had  dashed  his  hope  that  the  marshal  was  at  their 
heels. 

Retreat  might  have  been  prudent.  But  whither?  Face 
Paris,  with  its  coldly  unsympathetic  corps  legislatif?  Face 
France,  with  its  disaffected  and  rebellious  population? 

No;  Napoleon's  only  refuge  was  victory,  lie  must  hasten 
to  break  the  British  centre  before  the  Prussians  came.  Un- 
der a  cannonade  that  shook  the  earth  and  cracked  the  skies, 
5000  French  horsemen  plunged  down  La  Belle  Alliance, 
loped  across  the  valley  and  spurred  up  the  still  nniddy  slope 
of  Mt.  St.  Jean.  There  they  rode  over  the  British  gunners 
but  broke  like  an  ocean  wave  against  the  squares  of  British 
infantry.     Again  and  again  they  were  beaten  off.     Another 


442  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

drove  of  5000  horses  swept  up  the  hill  and  still  another  drove 
of  5000  dashed  through  the  hurricane  of  iron  and  fire  and 
spent  itself  upon  the  steel  girt  squares. 

"Will  those  English  never  show  us  their  backs?"  Napo- 
leon impatiently  exclaimed,  as  he  lowered  his  field  glasses. 
Four  times  Marshal  Ney,  with  increasing  madness,  sent  his 
horsemen  upon  Mt.  St.  Jean  and  four  times  they  recoiled  as 
from  an  oven  door.  They  were  the  most  magnificent  charges 
in  the  spectacle  of  warfare,  and  the  most  futile,  since  they 
were  neither  preceded  nor  supported  by  infantry. 

Meanwhile  Hougoumont  was  enveloped  in  smoke.  Its 
defenders  had  been  driven  from  the  garden  into  the  chateau. 
Soon  its  walls  were  ablaze  from  the  fire  of  the  French  howit- 
zers, and  the  British  fled  to  some  small  detached  buildings, 
which  they  held  to  the  last  against  sword  and  flame.  The 
flre  spread  to  the  chapel,  but  stopped  at  a  statue  of  the  Virgin 
which  is  reverently  shown  there  to  this  day. 

The  French  captured  La  Haye  Sainte,  that  citadel  in  front 
of  the  British  centre.  It  was  then,  if  ever,  that  Wellington 
pleaded  with  fortune,  ' '  Bliicher  or  night ! ' '  His  red  line  was 
sagging  from  the  successive  blows  that  had  been  rained  upon 
it.  Here  and  there  were  yawning  gaps  hewn  by  the  lances 
of  France,  and  disorder  ruled  in  the  British  rear,  where  the 
stragglers  from  the  front  filled  the  Forest  of  Soignes  with  a 
babel  of  tongues. 

Ney's  attack  was  even  worse  spent  than  the  British  re- 
sistance. He  hurried  a  courier  up  to  La  Belle  Alliance  not 
far  from  six  o'clock  with  an  appeal  for  infantry.  "Infan- 
try," the  Emperor  exclaimed.  "Where  shall  I  get  any? 
Would  you  have  me  make  them?" 

The  battle  between  Napoleon  and  Wellington  really  had 
come  to  an  end  an  hour  before.  And  the  Duke  had  won. 
For  he  had  undertaken  to  do  no  more  than  stand  his  ground 
until  the  Prussians  came. 

When,  some  time  before  four  o'clock,  the  head  of  Billow's 
column  emerged  from  the  Wood  of  Paris  and  marched  against 
the  French  right.  Napoleon  had  abandoned  the  British  to 
Ney  and  left  him  with  only  40,000  men  to  face  the  more  than 


WATERLOO  443 

50,000  soldiers  that  Wellington  still  had.  For  the  Emperor 
had  to  take  a  large  body  of  men  from  his  front  to  save  his 
flank  from  the  Prussians  at  Planchenoit. 

The  spire  of  the  church  of  Planchenoit  still  looks  out  over 
the  field  of  Waterloo.  In  the  morning  of  that  battle  Sunday, 
the  priest  had  said  mass  at  its  altar.  In  the  afternoon,  its 
yard  was  reddened  with  the  blood  of  Gaul  and  Teuton,  the 
combat  raging  fiercest  about  its  walls.  As  early  as  four 
thirty,  this  second  battle  began  with  30,000  Prussians  against 
the  20,000  French,  whose  vanguard  was  the  Fifth  of  the  line, 
the  battalion  that  the  Emperor  had  conquered  with  a  glance 
in  the  defile  of  Laffrey  as  he  marched  back  from  Elba. 
Planchenoit  changed  masters  with  lightning  rapidity  as  the 
village  was  taken  and  retaken.  At  last  the  French  held  it 
so  well  in  hand  that  the  Emperor  could  turn  upon  Welling- 
ton again  at  seven  o'clock. 

The  early  summer  sun  still  granted  him  a  respite  of  two 
hours  when  he  rode  down  into  the  valley,  where  from  La  Haye 
Sainte,  his  eye  swept  the  thin  and  jagged  British  line.  But 
there  remained  to  him  only  3500  of  his  Guard.  Behind  that 
fragment  of  his  invincible  corps,  he  gathered  the  wreckage  of 
his  army,  putting  in  his  last  man  for  one  supreme,  desperate 
effort  to  turn  the  tide. 

While  he  was  preparing  for  the  attack,  a  captain  of  carabi- 
neers deserted  his  ranks  and  raced  ahead  through  the  hail  of 
shot  and  shell  straight  toward  the  enemy.  Raising  his  right 
hand  as  he  drew  near  the  British,  the  traitor  cried  out: 
"Long  live  the  King  of  England!"  The  redcoats  lowered 
their  guns  before  their  strange  visitor,  who  now  shouted : 
"Get  ready!  Napoleon,  the  scoundrel,  wall  be  upon  j'ou  with 
his .  Guard  in  less  than  half  an  hour ! ' ' 

The  British  line  closed  up  and  braced  itself  for  the  assault. 
Even  Napoleon  himself  might  come,  for  Bliicher,  too,  was 
coming,  as  every  bulldog  in  the  pack  well  knew. 

Forward  moved  the  little  band  of  French.  Even  as  they 
went,  the  van  of  Bliicher 's  Prussians  burst  upon  the  scene 
from  Papelotte.  A  thrill  of  panic  ran  through  tlie  slender 
ranks  of  the  advancing  column  of  French  as  they  looked  into 


444     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

the  barrels  of  Wellington's  muzzles  in  front  of  them,  heard 
Billow  still  pounding  upon  their  flank  and  saw  Bliicher  mov- 
ing upon  their  right. 

The  ringing  tones  of  the  master's  voice  rallied  them  and 
aroused  their  Gallic  spirit.  Couriers  were  sent  over  the  field 
to  spread  the  cheering  delusion  that  Grouchy,  too,  was  com- 
ing. Now  the  Guard  went  forward  as  steady  as  if  on  re- 
view, led  by  Ney,  his  face  begrimed  with  powder,  his  sword 
broken,  his  hat  and  coat  rent  by  bullets.  As  he  went,  the 
marshal's  horse  was  shot  from  under  him  for  the  fifth  time 
that  afternoon  and  the  marshal  rolled  on  the  ground ;  but, 
struggling  to  his  feet  and  waving  his  broken  sword,  he 
marched  on  afoot. 

When  the  French  came  within  200  yards,  the  British  can- 
non flamed  in  their  faces.  Yet  the  charging  battalions  did 
not  bend  before  the  yawning  guns,  but  drowned  their  roar 
with  shouts  of  "Vive  I'Empereur. "  Sweeping  over  the  Brit- 
ish batteries,  and,  sniffing  victory  at  last,  they  rushed  on  with 
quickening  pace. 

Division  commanders  cried  out  to  Wellington  for  reinforce- 
ments to  save  their  troops  from  destruction.  But  he  had 
none  to  give.  *'Let  them  all  die,"  the  Iron  Duke  replied  as 
he  stood  by  the  elm  tree  beside  the  Brussels  road.  "Hold 
on  to  the  very  last  man,  so  as  to  give  the  Prussians  time  to 
come  up." 

The  French  now,  near  eight  o'clock,  were  close  upon  the 
Duke  himself  when  he  gave  the  memorable  command, 
"Stand  up  Guards  and  make  ready!"  The  British  Foot 
Guards,  who  had  been  lying  in  wait,  sprang  from  the  earth 
like  dragons'  teeth  and  opened  a  murderous  fire  at  sixty 
paces.  Still,  leaping  over  their  own  dead  and  wounded,  on 
came  the  Gauls  to  hurl  themselves  against  the  pitiless  steel, 
and  then  stagger  back. 

In  that  instant  when  the  Old  Guard  recoiled,  the  name  of 
Waterloo  became  forever  a  synonym  not  of  victory  but  of 
defeat. 

The  death  cry  of  the  Empire  rang  out  on  the  evening  air : 
' '  The  Guard  gives  way ! "     "  The  Guard  gives  way  ! ' '     For 


WATERLOO  445 

the  first  time  on  any  field,  that  lamentation  ran  through  the 
ranks  of  France,  as  the  stricken  Guard  reeled  back,  caught  in 
a  demoralising  cross  fire  from  the  victorious  foes  who 
swarmed  about  it. 

Bliicher's  Prussians  were  now  getting  into  action  and  fast 
working  in  behind  the  French,  when  Wellington  rose  in  his 
stirrups  and  waved  his  cocked  hat.  At  that  signal,  the  whole 
British  army  poured  down  Mt.  St.  Jean  and  fell  upon  the 
staggering  foe. 

Not  far  from  the  spot  where  France  has  planted  a  memorial 
sculpture  of  a  wounded  eagle,  Napoleon,  sitting  on  his  little 
white  horse  by  the  wall  of  La  Haye  Sainte,  strove  once  more 
and  for  the  last  time,  to  form  a  martial  line.  He  had  only 
one  round  of  shot  left  for  his  battery.  But  he  pieced  to- 
gether a  few  broken  fragments  of  the  Guard  and  ranging 
them  in  three  squares  for  an  orderly  retreat,  he  took  his 
place  in  the  centre  of  one  of  them. 

As  those  frail  squares  retreated  across  the  valley,  with 
the  huge  British  squares  pounding  against  them  like  batter- 
ing rams,  they  grew  thinner  and  thinner.  Soon  Napoleon 
left  them,  and  with  a  few  chasseurs  fled  the  lost  field,  bitterly 
to  lament  in  after  time,  ''Waterloo !  Waterloo  !  It  is  there  I 
should  have  died ! ' ' 

A  British  officer  yelled  to  the  Guard  to  surrender.  Its 
commander,  Cambronne,  was  a  rude,  uncouth  son  of  Mars, 
who,  as  a  fighting  man,  had  succeeded  La  Tour  d'Auvergne 
in  the  honourary  post  of  the  first  grenadier  of  France.  His 
reply  to  the  Briton  was  not  at  all  the  polite  and  even  noble 
observation,  ' '  The  Old  Guard  dies,  but  never  surrenders ! ' ' 
which  a  Parisian  journalist  substituted  for  the  unprintable 
original.  Yet  that  was  what  Cambronne  should  have  said, 
for  that  was  his  spirit.  He  and  the  Guard  slashed  a  path 
to  the  height  of  La  Belle  Alliance.  Then  he  fell  from  a  ball 
that  struck  him  in  the  face  and  became  a  captive  in  the  hands 
of  the  foe. 

As  Marshal  Ney  had  been  the  first  to  advance,  he  was  de- 
termined to  be  the  last  to  retreat.  In  the  midst  of  the  wild 
rout,  he  implored  the  soldiers  as  they  raced  by  him  to  stop 


446  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

and  turn  their  faces  to  the  enemy.  But  life  still  held  its 
lure  for  others,  though  not  for  him. 

"If  you  and  I  escape,"  Ney  warned  Count  d'Erlon,  "we 
shall  be  hanged. ' '  Even  his  hat  and  his  epaulettes  were  gone 
now,  when,  brandishing  his  broken  sword,  he  rallied  his  men 
for  one  more  stand. 

"Come,  my  friends,"  he  shouted,  "come  on,  and  see  a 
marshal  of  France  die!"  But  an  unkind  fate  had  decreed 
that  he  should  not  die  like  a  marshal  of  France.  In  vain  he 
wooed  death  beside  the  Brussels  road,  but  only  to  be  caught 
in  the  undertow  of  the  ebbing  tide  of  the  Empire  and  swept 
on  to  an  ignominious  fate. 

The  British  moved  across  the  valley  and  mounted  La  Belle 
Alliance,  where  the  Prussians  joined  them.  There  Welling- 
ton and  Prince  Bliieher  rejoiced  together  in  victory.  The 
Duke's  forces  were  too  badly  winded  to  continue  the  pursuit 
of  Napoleon,  and  the  hard-hating  old  Prince  welcomed  the 
task  of  bagging  the  eagle  of  Jena.  Besides  he  had  left  his 
pipe  in  Paris  on  the  last  campaign  and  he  wished  to  recover 
it. 

As  Wellington  passed  over  the  field  on  his  way  to  his  sleep- 
ing quarters  at  Waterloo,  the  moon  burst  through  the  clouds 
and  lit  up  the  pallid  faces  of  the  fallen,  who  lay  in  windrows 
at  the  foot  of  Mt.  St.  Jean.  The  gardens  and  houses  of 
Hougouraont  and  La  Haye  Sainte  were  crowded  with  the 
dead,  and  the  well  of  the  old  chateau  was  all  but  filled  with 
the  bodies  that  had  been  tumbled  into  it  to  clear  the  ground 
for  the  fighting. 

The  losses  in  the  battle  were  fairly  equal.  The  French 
killed,  wounded,  and  captured  aggregated  about  25,000,  or 
one-third  of  the  force  engaged.  The  British,  themselves, 
lost  8500;  the  Hanoverians,  Dutch  and  Belgians,  7500,  and 
the  Prussians  7000,  or  a  total  of  23,000  for  the  Allies. 
Among  the  wounded  was  Pozzo  di  Borgo,  whose  slight  in- 
juries, however,  did  not  restrain  his  rejoicing,  "I  have  thrown 
the  last  shovelful  of  earth  on  Napoleon's  coffin." 

With  the  shadow  of  Waterloo  on  his  brow  and  in  the  silence 
of  despair,  Napoleon  rode  through  the  night,  his  bridle  reins 


WATERLOO  447 

fallen  from  his  hand  and  lying  on  the  neck  of  his  horse. 
At  midnight  he  passed  over  the  battlefield  of  Quatre  Bras, 
where  the  moon  rested  like  a  spotlight  upon  the  bodies  of 
the  dead,  stripped  naked  by  the  ghouls  of  war  and  denied 
either  a  grave  or  a  shirt  to  cover  them. 

Arriving  at  Charleroi  at  daybreak,  he  freed  himself  from 
the  wretched  mob  of  40,000  to  hasten  to  Paris.  His  treasure 
wagon  was  cast  aside,  and  the  populace  and  the  drunken  sol- 
diery plundered  its  bags  of  gold.  The  imperial  coach  was 
abandoned  and  in  it  a  lot  of  diamonds,  which  a  Prussian 
major  claimed  as  his  booty. 

As  Napoleon  re-entered  France  and  left  the  night  of  horror 
behind  him,  he  took  heart  to  argue,  "All  is  not  lost."  But  a 
rumour  of  the  catastrophe  sped  on  before  him,  and  a  strange 
hush  rested  upon  the  people  as  the  fallen  Colossus  passed  by. 


CHAPTER  L 

THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE 

1815     AGE  45-46 

ARRIVING  in  Paris  the  third  morning  after  "Waterloo, 
with  the  pallor  of  a  great  calamity  in  his  face  and  a 
tumult  of  emotions  in  his  breast,  Napoleon  alighted  be- 
fore the  Elysee  palace.  He  was  still  covered  with  the  dust  of 
the  battle  and  the  rout.  His  staff  were  excited  and  red  eyed, 
their  clothes  blood-stained  and  torn  by  bullets  and  sabres. 

There  was  no  appeal  from  the  verdict  of  Waterloo.  Napo- 
leon complained  that  if  he  had  been  the  King  of  England  in- 
stead of  Emperor  of  the  French,  he  could  have  lost  the  battle 
without  losing  a  vote  in  parliament.  "Waterloo  was  more 
than  a  battle  lost.     It  was  a  catastrophe,  a  debacle. 

It  was  no  mere  misadventure,  no  unlucky  accident.  It 
was  not  lost  so  much  by  Bliicher's  chancing  to  join  Welling- 
ton as  by  the  junction  of  those  ever  invincible  allies,  cause  and 
effect.  On  that  fatal  field.  Napoleon  reaped  the  whirlwind. 
All  the  mistakes  and  faults  of  his  life  rose  before  him,  as  be- 
fore a  drowning  man,  and  inflicted  upon  him  their  inexorable 
penalty.  Waterloo  was  more  a  moral  than  a  military  dis- 
aster. 

The  Emperor  never  felt  more  fit  than  on  the  morning  of 
the  battle.  Never  on  any  field  had  he  more  gladly,  more  con- 
fidently drawn  his  sword.  As  he  himself  enthusiastically 
testified,  his  army  surpassed  itself  in  valour.  For  twelve 
hours  of  daylight,  he  had  the  heaviest  battalions  on  his  side, 
with  more  men,  more  cannon,  and  more  horses  than  Welling- 
ton. But  in  the  blindness  of  self-confidence,  he  who  had 
laughed  at  the  Pyrenees  and  the  Alps,  at  rivers  and  deserts, 
idled  away  nine  hours  because  of  a  little  mud  that  would  not 
have  been  suffered  to  delay  a  football  game. 

448 


THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE  449 

If  he  had  to  fight  three  battles  at  once,  it  was  only  because 
he  neglected  his  opportunity  to  fight  them  one  at  a  time. 
From  sunrise  until  four-thirty  in  the  afternoon,  Wellington 
alone  stood  before  him.  Billow's  Prussians  did  not  come 
up  until  four-thirty.  It  was  seven-thirty  and  later  before 
Bliicher's  army  appeared  on  the  field. 

Now,  when,  for  the  fourth  time  in  four  years,  the  Emperor 
returned  to  Paris  in  defeat  and  without  an  army,  patriots 
despairingly  turned  away  from  him  and  time-servers  shunned 
the  victim  of  ill  luck.  "Why,"  Fouche  complained,  "the 
gamester  can 't  even  win  a  play  any  more  ! ' '  W^hile  that  im- 
mortal sleuth  crept  about,  plotting  to  make  himself  the  Tal- 
leyrand, the  manager  of  this  second  downfall,  the  corps 
legistatif  listened  to  the  disinterested  councils  of  Lafayette 
and  undertook  to  assume  the  control  of  the  government.  All 
factions  sought  by  disowning  and  discarding  Napoleon  to 
appease  the  Allies  and  arrest  their  march  on  Paris. 

At  noon  of  his  second  day  in  Paris,  the  one-time  master  of 
Europe  received  the  blunt  notice  that  the  legislative  bodies 
gave  him  an  hour  to  lay  down  the  sceptre.  Once  more  he 
took  up  his  pen  to  write  an  act  of  abdication.  A  pro- 
visional government  of  five  was  established  by  the  legisla- 
tors, with  Carnot  and  Caulaincourt  among  its  members  and 
the  feline  Fouche  as  its  president.  While  that  body  sat  in 
state  at  the  Tuileries,  the  dethroned  monarch  lingered  on  in 
the  Elysee,  almost  a  stranger  at  the  seat  of  his  Empire. 

Fouche  could  not  sit  easy  in  his  chair  while  the  master 
whom  he  had  so  often  betrayed  remained  only  a  few  hundred 
feet  away.  He  must  exorcise  the  ghost  in  the  Elysee,  and  it 
was  Marshal  Davout  who  accepted  the  delicate  task  of  order- 
ing away  from  Paris  the  man  who  had  made  him  the  Prince 
of  Eckmiihl. 

The  captor  of  the  capitals  of  Europe  retreated  from  his 
ovm  capital  the  Sunday  after  the  Battle  of  Waterloo.  As  he 
went,  he  passed  by  the  Arch  of  Triumph,  the  arch  of  his  star, 
which  looked  down  upon  him  only  to  deride  his  fallen  for- 
tunes. 

The  late  lord  of  the  Tuileries,  of  Fontaiuebleau,  of  Com- 


450  IN  TPIE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

piegne,  of  Ramboiiillet  no  longer  had  a  roof  that  he  could 
call  his  own.  No  doubt  there  were  still  friends  who  would 
welcome  him  to  their  homes.  He  knew,  however,  that  their 
hospitality  to  him  probably  would  mean  their  ruin  under  the 
returning  Bourbons. 

In  that  plight  he  thought  of  only  one  refuge.  If  he  went 
to  Malmaison,  which  he  had  given  to  Josephine,  surely  no  one 
would  punish  Hortense  for  opening  its  doors  to  him.  When 
he  left  Paris,  therefore,  he  drove  to  that  chateau  of  the  bril- 
liant days  of  the  Consulate,  when  all  the  world  was  young. 
But  he  knew  that  even  that  shelter  would  be  denied  him  in 
a  few  days.  He  was  not  only  subject  to  Fouche's  orders, 
but  the  Allies  were  moving  down  the  valley  of  the  Oise  on 
their  march  to  Paris,  far  more  intent  on  capturing  him  than 
on  taking  the  city. 

Marshal  Bliicher  thirsted  for  his  blood  and  longed  to  shoot 
him  at  the  head  of  his  Prussian  columns.  The  Duke  of  AVel- 
lington  objected  to  any  such  summary  action.  "Napoleon 
does  not  belong  to  you  nor  to  me,"  the  Duke  argued,  "but  to 
our  sovereigns,  who  will  decide  his  fate  in  the  name  of 
Europe.  Should  they  require  an  executioner,  I  shall  re- 
quest them  to  seek  some  other  than  me,  and  I  advise  you,  for 
the  sake  of  your  fame,  to  follow  my  example." 

Captivity  or  flight  was  the  choice  presented  to  Napoleon. 
He  rejected  suicide  as  a  means  of  escape,  and  scorned  a  char- 
acteristic suggestion  from  Fouche  that  he  sneak  off  in  dis- 
guise. Most  of  his  advisers  urged  him  to  seek  asylum  in  the 
United  States;  Queen  Hortense  suggested  that  he  should 
trust  himself  to  his  father-in-law,  the  Emperor  of  Austria. 
Caulaincourt  proposed  that  he  should  choose  Russia  and  accept 
the  protection  of  his  old  friend,  the  Czar  Alexander. 

Napoleon  himself  strongly  preferred  England.  "Give  my- 
self up  to  Austria?"  he  said.  "Never.  She  has  seized  upon 
my  wife  and  my  son.  Give  myself  up  to  Russia?  That 
would  be  to  one  man  only.  But  to  give  myself  up  to  Eng- 
land— that  would  be  to  throw  myself  upon  a  people." 

He  had  reason  enough  not  to  seek  the  hospitality  of  any 
of  the  countries  he  had  conquered.     Caulaincourt  feared  that 


THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE  451 

even  the  English  were  too  embittered  by  their  long  struggle 
against  him  to  give  him  a  generous  welcome.  ''Then,  as  I 
am  refused  the  society  of  men,"  he  replied,  "I  shall  betake 
myself  to  the  bosom  of  nature  and  enjoy  the  solitude  that 
suits  mj^  last  thoughts."  Thus  he  expressed  his  decision  to 
go  to  America,  which  he  seemed  to  regard  as  a  semisavage 
wilderness. 

As  the  banished  monarch  prepared  to  depart  with  the  little 
company  that  had  volunteered  to  share  his  exile,  Queen  Hor- 
tense,  who  had  presided  over  his  home  throughout  the  Hun- 
dred Days  and  who  was  his  hostess  at  Malmaison,  insisted 
on  his  receiving  from  her  a  diamond  necklace  as  the  last  tes- 
timonial of  her  devotion.  The  necklace  could  be  easily  car- 
ried and  concealed,  and  in  case  of  need,  its  stones  would  bring 
him  $40,000. 

Cardinal  Feseh  and  Mme.  Mere  came,  as  to  the  cell  of  the 
condemned,  to  say  good-bye.  The  memory  of  Josephine,  which 
had  haunted  him  throughout  his  stay  at  Malmaison,  received 
the  exile's  last  farewell.  Alone  in  her  room  he  held  com- 
munion with  the  spirit  of  the  dead  as  he  himself  was  about 
to  enter  into  a  living  death. 

Out  on  the  lawn  at  Malmaison,  a  stone  has  been  cherished 
now  for  a  century.  Upon  that  carriage  block,  Napoleon  took 
his  last  step  at  the  chateau  and  his  first  step  into  exile,  when, 
in  the  waning  of  the  tenth  day  after  Waterloo,  he  entered  the 
carriage  that  was  to  bear  him  away  from  scenes  so  happily 
associated  with  his  vanished  hopes  and  his  vanished  glory. 

Driving  to  the  imperial  chateau  of  Rambouillet,  he  slept 
for  the  last  time  beneath  a  palace  roof.  The  next  day  he  re- 
sumed his  journey,  which  led  him  through  Tours  and  Niort 
to  the  naval  port  of  Rochefort,  on  the  Bay  of  Biscay. 

Now  as  ever  when  he  turned  his  face  to  the  water,  he  was 
confronted  with  the  wooden  walls  of  England,  whose  ubiqui- 
tous ships  lay  at  the  harbour  mouth.  Driven  forth  from  the 
land,  even  the  ocean  refused  him  a  haven. 

Various  and  equally  doubtful  projects  were  presented  for 
running  the  British  blockade.  Napoleon's  pride  rejected  the 
proposal  of    a  Danish   captain  to  conceal   him   in   a  barrel 


452  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

aboard  a  merchant  vessel,  and  he  hesitated  to  risk  a  running 
fight  through  the  blockading  fleet,  which  a  French  naval  cap- 
tain offered  to  undertake.  Joseph  Bonaparte  besought  him 
to  profit  by  their  close  resemblance  and  take  the  cabin  he  had 
engaged  aboard  an  American  ship,  sailing  from  Bordeaux. 
Napoleon,  however,  would  not  consent  to  seek  safety  for  him- 
self at  the  sacrifice  of  his  brother's. 

In  the  midst  of  that  confusion  of  counsels,  he  received 
peremptory  orders  to  move  on  once  more.  On  the  very  day 
when  Louis  XVIII  re-entered  the  Tuileries  at  Paris,  the  de- 
throned sovereign  went  to  the  village  of  Fouras,  which  sits 
on  the  outermost  headland  of  the  coast.  There  on  the  pier 
of  Fouras,  some  loyal  hand  has  carved  the  name  of  Napoleon 
to  mark  the  last  spot  on  the  mainland  of  France  which  the 
outcast  Emperor  trod  before  he  boarded  the  French  frigate 
Saale,  and  accepted  the  only  refuge  left  him  beneath  his  flag. 

Presumably  the  Bourbons,  if  he  had  fallen  into  their  hands, 
would  not  have  been  any  more  lenient  than  the  Prussians. 
They  did  not  hesitate  to  stand  Marshal  Ney  up  against  the 
garden  wall  of  the  Luxembourg  and  shoot  down  that  ''brav- 
est of  the  brave ' '  in  the  Grand  Army  because  he  had  followed 
his  soldiers  in  their  break  to  the  Emperor.  Labedoyere,  the 
enthusiastic  young  officer  who  delivered  his  regiment  over 
to  the  Emperor  as  he  was  marching  on  Grenoble,  met  the 
same  extreme  punishment  for  breaking  his  oath  of  allegiance 
to  Louis  XVIII,  and  Lavalette,  Napoleon's  old-time  staff  of- 
ficer, whom  he  married  to  one  of  Hortense's  schoolmates  at 
Mme.  Campan's,  was  saved  from  a  like  fate  only  by  the  clev- 
erness and  courage  of  his  beautiful  wife.  Mme.  Lavalette, 
having  smuggled  herself  into  her  husband's  prison  and 
changed  clothes  with  him,  took  his  place  in  the  cell  while 
he  made  good  his  escape.  But  the  ordeal  quite  upset  the 
reason  of  the  plucky  and  devoted  woman  and  left  her  hope- 
lessly mad  the  rest  of  her  days. 

Another  tragedy  of  the  downfall  was  the  death  of  Murat. 
The  fugitive  King  of  Naples,  rebuffed  by  Napoleon  from  the 
shores  of  France,  tried  to  emulate  the  Emperor's  return  from 
Elba.     But  he  had  no  sooner  landed  on  the  coast  of  his  former 


THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE  453 

kingdom  than  he  was  arrested.  Being;  tried  on  the  spot  and 
sentenced  to  death,  he  stood  before  the  firing  squad  with  an 
appeal  that  was  characteristic  at  once  of  his  weakness  and  his 
strength:     "Spare  my  face  and  fire  at  my  heart." 

All  the  while  Napoleon's  own  original  choice  of  throwing 
himself  upon  the  British  nation  was  only  gaining  in  strength. 
He  had  always  known  England  as  the  inviolable  sanctuary  of 
unfortunate  monarchs  and  patriots.  He  had  seen  it  shelter 
the  Bourbons  from  the  storms  of  the  Revolution  and  of  the 
Empire.  In  his  Corsican  youth  he  had  revered  it  as  the  pro- 
tector and  host  of  Paoli,  and  had  his  mother  not  resisted  his 
father's  wish  to  accompany  that  island  chieftain,  he  himself 
would  have  been  born  under  its  protection. 

He  knew,  of  course,  that  Paoli  or  Louis  XVIII  had  not, 
like  himself,  been  an  enemy  of  England.  But  he  would  not 
go  to  her  as  the  warrior  and  monarch  who  had  fought  her 
for  twenty  years.  He  would  even  change  his  name  and  call 
himself  Colonel  Muiron  or  General  Duroc  after  one  or  the 
other  of  those  friends  who  had  fallen  by  his  side.  If,  how- 
ever, England  should  turn  him  away,  he  could  still  adopt  his 
second  choice  and  go  to  America. 

Two  of  his  retinue,  Savary  and  Las  Cases,  were  sent  to  the 
British  ship  Bellerophon  to  sound  its  commander.  Captain 
]\Iaitland.  In  his  natural  eagerness  to  have  the  credit  of 
delivering  Napoleon  over  to  the  government  at  London,  the 
captain  was  most  cordial  if  not  specific  in  his  assurances. 
He  did  not  make  it  his  business  to  tell  his  visitors  that  he  had 
been  ordered  to  "take  Bonaparte"  if  he  could  and  "bring 
him  to  the  nearest  English  port  in  all  possible  haste  and 
secrecy. ' ' 

But  Napoleon  himself  very  well  knew  that  his  fate  did  not 
rest  in  the  hands  of  a  naval  captain,  and  before  he  went 
aboard  the  Bellerophon,  he  made  this  eloquent  appeal  to 
George  IV,  Prince  Regent  of  England : 

Your  Royal  Highness: 

Exposed  to  the  factions  which  divide  my  country  and  the  hatred 
of  the  principal  powers  of  Europe,  I  have  terminated  ray  political 
career,  and  I  come,  like  Themistocles,  to  seat  myself  beside  the  hearth 


454     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

of  the  British  nation,  I  place  myself  under  the  protection  of  its 
laws,  which  I  claim  from  your  Royal  Highness  as  the  most  power- 
ful, the  most  constant  and  the  most  generous  of  my  enemies. 

Napoleon". 

Having  despatched  that  message  by  a  special  vessel,  which 
Maitland  provided,  he  lingered  only  one  more  day  beneath 
the  tricoloured  flag.  It  is  fitting  that  his  last  day  in  France 
should  have  been  the  14th  of  July,  the  fete  day  of  the  nation. 
For  the  fall  of  the  Bastille  six  and  twenty  years  before  opened 
an  era  which  had  closed  with  the  fall  of  his  Empire. 

On  the  day  after  the  national  holiday,  one  last  cry  of  ' '  Vive 
I'Empereur"  rang  out  sadly  from  the  crew  of  the  French 
ship  as  Napoleon  grasped  the  ladder  of  the  Bellerophon  and, 
with  brow  unclouded,  passed  under  the  British  flag.  Al- 
though he  w^as  not  received  with  a  salute  by  the  guns,  Captain 
Maitland  greeted  him  as  Emperor  and  gave  him  his  cabin. 

The  captive  was  not  long  in  conquering  the  sympathies  of 
his  captor.  i\Iaitland  appears  to  have  found  him  a  delight- 
ful and  fascinating  guest,  and  he  heard  not  a  complaining 
word  from  him.  He  walked  the  deck  a  good  deal.  Often  he 
stood  alone  and  silent,  his  followers  respectfully  standing 
apart  and  at  a  distance  while  he  gazed  upon  the  unconquered 
and  conquering  sea.  He  seemed,  however,  to  have  difficulty 
in  keeping  awake,  and  the  only  book  the  captain  saw  him 
reading  was  a  biography  of  the  son  of  another  revolution — 
Washington. 

After  voyaging  northward  a  week,  the  Bellerophon  sighted 
the  lonely,  heather-clad  tors  of  Dartmoor.  Soon  the  beauti- 
ful, outstretched  arms  of  Torbay  received  the  monarch  who 
was  sailing  away  from  a  throne,  even  as  a  century  and  a  quar- 
ter before  they  had  welcomed  William  of  Orange  to  a  throne. 
The  bay  is  so  Italian  in  its  soft  loveliness  that  it  seems  alien 
to  the  stern  Devon  coast,  and  it  took  Napoleon  by  surprise. 
As  his  eye  roved  entranced  from  Brixham  to  Torquay,  he 
remarked,  "It  is  like  a  Mediterranean  harbour — as  beautiful 
as  the  harbour  of  Portoferra jo. "  He  was  to  see  little  enough 
thenceforth  in  his  second  exile  to  remind  him  of  the  beauties 
of  his  first. 


THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE  455 

After  lying  at  anchor  for  two  days  the  Bellerophon  pro- 
ceeded to  Plymouth.  As  Napoleon  found  himself  sailing 
westward  and  farther  away  from  London  he  could  not  miss 
the  probable  meaning  of  this  movement. 

At  the  Plymouth  anchorage,  the  Bellerophon  was  sur- 
rounded and  guarded  by  armed  picket  craft  and  the  harbour 
was  almost  covered  with  the  boats  of  the  curious.  People 
eagerly  swarmed  from  distant  parts  of  the  kingdom  to  the  old 
town  by  the  Plym.  Sometimes  there  were  as  many  as  1000 
boats  with  8000  occupants  crowded  about  the  Belleroplwn, 
struggling,  clamouring,  and  even  risking  their  lives  to  catch 
a  glimpse  of  the  foremost  man  of  the  world  walking  the  deck 
in  captivity. 

There  was  an  ominous  absence  of  official  callers  and  official 
information  aboard.  A  dread  of  imprisonment  in  the  Tower 
of  London  arose  among  the  French.  Out  of  the  dark  cloud 
of  mystery  there  came  whispered  hints  of  St.  Helena. 

The  government  harshly  interpreted  the  darkest  passions  of 
the  hour.  It  is  doubtful  if  any  cabinet,  however  magnanimous 
its  sentiments  might  have  been,  w'ould  have  dared  to  dally 
with  so  high  an  explosive  as  Napoleon  still  was  supposed  to 
be.  As  his  custodian,  England  not  only  owed  a  duty  to  her- 
self but  also  had  to  consider  her  Allies,  one  of  whom,  at 
least,  would  have  joj^ed  in  shooting  him  down  like  a  mad 
dog. 

No  one  could  have  known  then,  as  all  should  be  able  to  see 
now,  that  he  was  an  extinct  volcano.  His  power  to  shake  the 
earth  had  come  from  the  people  and  he  had  lost  it.  His  race 
was  run,  his  course  of  conquest  was  finished  and  he  had  but  a 
few  years  to  live. 

All  that  is  hindsight.  And  it  would  have  been  unreason- 
able to  expect  any  foresight  in  the  Tory  lords,  who  con- 
trolled the  British  ministrj'^  of  the  day.  The  monarchs  of 
Europe  had  from  time  to  time  made  terms  with  Napoleon, 
but  the  aristocracies  never  had  relented  in  their  rage  against 
the  scourge  of  feudalism  and  class  privilege.  When  they 
unhorsed  the  giant  and  bound  him,  therefore,  they  imagined 
they  had  overthrown  and  caught  the  French  Revolution  itself. 


456  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

After  four  days  of  suspense  aboard  the  Bellerophon  in 
Plymouth  harbour,  a  suspense  which  the  central  figure  bore 
without  any  outward  sign  of  the  strain,  Admiral  Lord  Keith 
appeared.  Entering  Napoleon's  cabin,  Keith  read  to  him 
the  order  that  ''General  Bonaparte"  should  be  conveyed  to 
St.  Helena. 

The  distinguished  condemned  made  his  protest  quietly  and 
in  a  few  sentences.  Apparently  he  did  nothing  to  render  the 
task  of  his  visitor  more  difficult,  for  after  the  interview  Keith 
exclaimed:  "Damn  the  fellow!  If  he  had  obtained  an  in- 
terview with  His  Royal  Highness  (the  Prince  Regent),  in 
half  an  hour  they  would  have  been  the  best  friends  in  Eng- 
land." 

The  orders  of  the  government  allowed  the  captive  to  choose 
three  officers  to  be  his  companions  and  a  physician  to  attend 
him  in  his  captivity.  "While  the  little  company  that  had  come 
with  him  on  the  Bellerophon  awaited  his  selection,  there 
never  was  a  more  anxious  rivalry  for  his  favour  when  he  sat 
on  the  throne  of  France  than  there  was  now  for  the  privilege 
of  sharing  his  exile. 

"When  the  time  came  for  him  to  pass  to  the  Northumher- 
Imid,  which  was  detailed  to  carry  him  to  St.  Helena,  those 
whom  he  had  been  obliged  to  omit  from  the  list  parted  from 
him  with  demonstrations  of  grief.  Savary  burst  into  tears 
and  threw  himself  at  the  feet  of  his  master.  He  and  General 
Lallemand,  for  supposed  offences  of  their  own,  had  been  ex- 
cluded from  the  St.  Helena  party  by  the  London  cabinet  and 
condemned  to  imprisonment  in  the  island  of  Malta. 

"You  see,  my  lord,"  said  Las  Cases  to  Admiral  Keith, 
"that  the  only  persons  in  tears  are  they  who  remain  behind." 
Las  Cases  had  gained  a  coveted  place  by  accepting  the  post 
of  secretary,  and  was  added  to  the  group  of  three  officers, 
who  were  Bertrand,  Montholon  and  Gourgaud. 

Before  sailing,  the  members  of  the  party,  like  any  other 
prisoners  about  to  be  booked,  were  required  to  surrender 
their  arras  and  valuables.  No  one  insisted  on  taking  Napo- 
leon's sword,  however,  and  while  the  baggage  of  all  was  ran- 
sacked, there  was  no  search  of  the  person.     The  exiles  were 


THE  CAPTIVE  EAGLE  457 

enabled  thus  to  conceal  on  themselves  some  gold  coin  and 
jewels. 

For  full  ten  weeks  the  N orihumherland  and  her  fleet  of 
lesser  vessels  sailed  southward.  As  they  were  passing  down 
the  coast  of  France,  the  French  eagerly  watched  for  a  glimpse 
of  their  native  land.  Several  times  a  vague  shadow  appeared 
before  their  gaze,  but  only  to  vanish  before  it  took  form.  At 
last  the  clouds  parted  and  their  eyes  were  gladdened  by  the 
sight  of  the  sun  shining  on  the  shore  of  Brittany.  As  France 
faded  and  finally  disappeared  forever  from  his  horizon,  Napo- 
leon stood  with  bared  head. 

Although  his  officials  and  servants  bore  themselves  toward 
him  as  if  he  were  still  in  the  Tuileries  and  wearing  the  crown 
of  Empire,  Admiral  Cockburn  and  his  subordinates  of  the 
Northumberland  studiously  observed  the  instructions  of  their 
government  and  took  great  pains  to  ignore  the  fact  that  he 
had  ever  been  more  than  a  general. 

The  former  Emperor,  who  had  sat  at  table  with  nearly 
every  reigning  monarch,  did  not  disdain  to  dine  each  day 
with  the  admiral  and  the  ship's  officers,  where  he  alternately 
interrogated  them  on  all  manner  of  subjects  and  recounted 
his  own  experiences  by  flood  and  field.  He  walked  the  deck 
a  good  deal,  often  with  the  admiral,  whose  arm  steadied  him 
when  the  sea  rolled.  He  was  also  in  the  habit  of  sitting  on 
one  of  the  guns,  which  the  sailors  christened  "the  Emperor's 
cannon." 

Most  of  the  day  was  passed  by  him  in  his  cabin,  where  he 
at  once  began  to  dictate  his  recollections  to  Las  Cases. 
"Labour  is  the  scythe  of  time,"  he  said  to  his  amanuensis,  as 
they  thus  relieved  the  tedium  of  the  long  trip.  His  evenings 
were  given  over  to  cards  with  the  admiral  or  his  fellow  trav- 
ellers in  the  general  cabin. 

The  ship  paused  at  Madeira,  but  no  one  went  ashore. 
Thenceforth  land  was  not  sighted  again  until  one  day  a  dark 
speck  appeared  in  the  sky.  The  larger  it  grew  the  blacker  it 
became.  It  was  St.  Helena.  At  last  the  islander  from  the 
Mediterranean  was  at  his  journey's  end  in  the  wide  solitude 
of  the  South  Atlantic. 


CHAPTER  LI 

ST.  HELENA 

1815-1821     AGE  46-51 

AS  the  NoriJiuniherland  drew  near  the  end  of  her  long 
trip,  Napoleon  watched  the  billows  of  the  southern  sea 
breaking  upon  the  lonely  shores  of  the  last  of  the 
chain  of  islands  that  so  fatefully  mark  the  voyage  of  his  life. 

Born  on  an  island  in  the  Mediterranean  and  crowned  on 
an  island  in  the  Seine,  he  took  his  first  wife  from  an  island 
in  the  West  Indies  and  won  his  second  in  a  battle  which  he 
launched  from  an  island  in  the  Danube.  For  the  possession 
of  the  island  of  Malta,  he  quarrelled  with  the  island  king- 
dom of  Great  Britain  and  lost  a  continent.  Exiled  first  to 
the  Island  of  Elba,  he  returned  to  challenge  again  his  insular 
foe  and,  losing  the  battle  once  more,  he  now  saw  from  the 
quarter  deck  of  the  Xorthumherland,  the  barren  and  black- 
ened sides  of  the  island  of  St.  Helena  waiting  to  shut  him  in 
forever  as  within  the  grim  walls  of  a  prison. 

If  he  had  found  it  consoling  in  his  Elban  exile,  the  year 
before,  to  overlook  Europe  from  the  windows  of  his  retreat, 
St.  Helena  ofi^ered  him  no  such  consolation.  It  is  like  a  raft 
anchored  in  mid-ocean.  Its  nearest  neighbour,  the  island  of 
Ascension,  is  500  miles  and  more  away,  while  it  is  1200  miles 
west  of  Africa  at  the  mouth  of  the  Congo,  1700  miles  east 
of  South  America  and  the  coast  of  Brazil,  nearly  4000  miles 
from  Europe  at  the  Strait  of  Gibraltar,  and  almost  5000  miles 
from  Paris. 

Remote  and  alien  as  it  seemed  to  him  from  the  moment  it 
first  swam  into  his  vision  until  at  the  end  of  five  and  a  half 
years,  his  eyes  were  closed  upon  it  in  death,  there  was  yet 

458 


ST.  HELENA  459 

a  certain  kinship  between  him  and  the  rock  of  his  captivity. 
Even  as  the  irresistible  force  of  a  violent  social  convulsion  had 
lifted  him  above  the  level  of  mankind,  so  in  some  awful  up- 
heaval of  nature,  the  fire-scarred  stone  that  forms  the  island 
of  St.  Helena  had  been  torn  from  the  ocean  bed  and  heaped 
in  a  mountainous  mass,  whose  jagged  peaks  pierce  the  clouds. 

A  more  solitary  and  melancholy  eyrie  could  not  have  been 
chosen  for  the  captive  eagle.  "With  an  area  of  forty-seven 
square  miles,  the  island  is  only  ten  miles  in  length  at  the 
longest  and  seven  miles  wide  at  the  widest.  When  the  fallen 
monarch,  who  had  ruled  60,000,000  people  came,  its  popula- 
tion was  less  than  3000,  mostly  African  slaves,  Chinese,  and 
East  Indians,  only  one  face  in  four  being  white. 

Napoleon  went  ashore  on  the  twentieth  anniversary  of  his 
entry  into  a  post  of  command.  For  it  was  on  the  16th  of 
October,  1795,  that  he  was  appointed  general-in-chief  of  the 
army  of  the  interior  in  control  of  the  city  of  Paris.  And  it 
was  on  the  16tli  of  October,  1815,  that  he  landed  at  James- 
town, the  diamonds  in  the  star  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  glit- 
tering through  the  dusk  from  the  breast  of  his  grey  overcoat 
as,  with  Admiral  Cockburn  on  one  side  of  him  and  Bertrand, 
grand  marshal  of  the  palace,  on  the  other,  he  walked  to  his 
lodgings  in  the  village. 

Seated  on  the  back  of  a  little  cape  pony  and  escorted  by 
the  admiral,  he  rode  away  in  the  morning  by  a  winding  road 
hewn  in  the  rugged  side  of  the  mountain,  up  out  of  the  ravine 
in  which  Jamestown  sits.  When  he  had  mounted  to  the  sum- 
mit, the  village  port  was  lost  to  view  and  he  looked  upon  the 
boundless  spaces  of  the  Atlantic.  Before  him  lay  the  heath- 
ery plateau  with  its  few  squalid  slave  huts  and  its  gnarled 
and  stunted  gum  trees  and  the  wild  grey  steeps  of  the  south- 
ern slope  of  St.  Helena.  It  was  within  that  drear  horizon 
that  he  was  condemned  to  life  imprisonment. 

After  visiting  and  silently  inspecting  Longwood,  a  group 
of  farm  buildings  which  the  British  government  had  chosen 
for  his  residence,  he  turned  back  to  wait  until  it  could  be 
repaired  and  furnished  for  his  occupancy.  On  his  outward 
ride  he  had  seen  from  the  road  a  little  bungalow  in  a  vale, 


460  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

surrounded  with  shady  trees  and  blooming  flowers,  where  the 
Balcombes,  an  English  tradesman's  family,  had  provided  a 
pretty  refuge  from  the  torrid  heat  of  Jamestown,  It  had 
seemed  to  him  an  oasis  in  a  stony  desert,  and,  with  the  con- 
sent of  the  admiral,  he  stopped  to  inquire  if  he  could  be 
sheltered  there. 

The  homeless  Emperor,  who  had  given  laws  to  Europe  from 
the  palaces  of  Paris,  Madrid,  Berlin,  Milan,  Vienna  and  Mos- 
cow, asked  only  for  the  privilege  of  living  in  a  summer  house 
or  garden  pavilion  out  on  the  lawn  at  the  Briars,  as  the  Bal- 
combes called  their  place,  and  he  was  permitted  to  settle 
there  at  once.  And  although  Jamestown  was  only  a  little 
more  than  a  mile  away,  it  never  again  saw  him  after  he  rode 
out  of  it  that  morning  following  his  arrival  in  the  island. 

December  and  the  tropic  summer  had  come  when  Long- 
wood  was  at  last  in  readiness  for  him,  and  he  entered  upon  his 
life  tenancy  of  the  place.  This  group  of  one-story  buildings, 
mostly  of  stone,  which  his  host,  the  British  nation,  had  pro- 
vided for  the  comfort  of  its  most  celebrated  guest,  was  only 
a  big  cow  shed  in  the  beginning  and  the  manure  still  lay 
heaped  beneath  its  wooden  floors.  From  a  trellised  porch, 
one  entered  a  rather  large  front  room  and  passed  through 
into  what  was  called  the  salon,  back  of  which  was  the  dining- 
room,  badly  lighted  only  by  a  glass  door.  Opening  out  of 
the  dining-room  on  one  side  was  the  library,  and  on  the 
other  was  the  study,  off  which  was  Napoleon's  bedroom,  with 
a  bathroom  behind  it. 

The  little  bedroom  became  the  exile's  sanctuary.  There  he 
set  up  his  camp  bed  and  there  he  placed  his  portraits  and 
sculptures  of  the  King  of  Eome  and  Marie  Louise.  The  most 
intimate  and  pathetic  touch  was  lent  by  the  presence  on  the 
mantel  of  a  tiny  slipper  that  belonged  to  the  little  King.  As 
a  reminder  of  the  days  of  conquest,  there  hung  by  the  chim- 
ney a  silver  watch  of  Frederick  the  Great,  taken  from  Pots- 
dam. 

No  strain  had  been  imposed  on  the  British  treasury  for  the 
decorations  and  furnishings.  The  walls,  stained  by  their 
former  base  uses,  were  covered  with  brown  nankeen.     IMuslin 


ST.  HELENA  461 

curtains  hung  at  the  windows,  and  the  chairs,  tables  and  sofas 
are  said  to  have  been  such  as  could  be  picked  up  on  the  island 
at  second-hand. 

The  landscape  was  nearly  as  bare  as  the  house.  In  one 
direction  lay  the  sea ;  but  the  prospect  was  made  somewhat 
disagreeable  by  the  high  trade  winds  which  blew  in  from  the 
southeast  almost  continually.  In  all  other  directions,  the  scant 
verdure  and  small  twisted  trees  of  the  valleys  wearied,  or  the 
huge,  bare  mountains  repelled  the  eye.  And  the  only  neigh- 
bours in  sight  were  the  red  coats  of  the  53d  regiment  of  the 
British  army  in  their  encampment  a  few  hundred  yards  away, 
just  beyond  a  ravine. 

Nor  could  the  captive  find  solace  in  the  bosom  of  his  house- 
hold, for  that  was  really  more  uncongenial  than  Longwood 
and  St.  Helena.  If  the  Tory  ministers,  when  they  were 
choosing  his  prison  isle  and  his  prison  house,  had  chosen  his 
companions,  they  could  hardly  have  found  a  group  of  per- 
sons better  calculated  to  torment  him  than  the  selection  made 
by  fate.  He  himself  had  scarcely  more  volition  in  the  matter 
than  he  had  in  the  designation  of  his  place  of  exile.  He  had 
to  take  such  as  offered  to  accompany  him,  for  even  he  could 
not  command  men  to  follow  him  into  a  tomb. 

Three  were  men  with  families,  and  two  had  dragged  their 
unwilling  wives  and  their  children  with  them  into  their  vol- 
untary captivity.  Mme.  Bertrand  went  with  her  three  chil- 
dren only  after  vainly  striving  to  swerve  her  husband  from 
his  purpose  and  after  failing  to  drown  herself  by  jumping 
overboard  into  Plymouth  harbour.  The  Countess  de  i\Ion- 
tholon,  who  was  accompanied  by  one  child,  had  still  less  rea- 
son for  sharing  her  husband's  devotion  to  the  unfortunate 
Emperor,  he  having  forbidden  from  the  throne  her  mar- 
riage to  Montholon  because  she  chanced  to  have  two  husbands 
living.  Count  de  Las  Cases  took  his  son  with  him,  but  he 
left  behind  him  a  wife  who  seems,  in  the  Count's  language, 
to  have  been  unable  to  "conceive  either  the  merit  or  the  charm 
of  heroic  resolutions  and  sacrifices."  The  fourth  member  of 
the  suite.  Dr.  Barry  O'Meara,  was  the  strangest  of  all  the 
followers,  for  that  Irish  surgeon  in  the  British  navy  never 


462  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

had  seen  Napoleon  until  the  prisoner  came  aboard  the  Belle- 
rophon. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  captive  was  by  no  means  condemned 
to  solitary  imprisonment.  On  the  contrary,  the  British  gov- 
ernment permitted  him  to  surround  himself  with  an  imperial 
establishment.  When  the  staff  at  Longwood  was  fully  organ- 
ised it  comprised  no  fewer  than  forty-one  persons. 

Yet  Napoleon  found  himself  frightfully  lonely  in  the  midst 
of  that  great  crowd  of  retainers.  He  had  been  doomed  from 
birth,  however,  to  a  life-long  loneliness  and  never  was  lone- 
lier at  St.  Helena  than  when  he  was  on  the  throne.  ''The 
Emperor  is  what  he  is,  my  dear  Gourgaud,"  General  Ber- 
trand  sighed.  ''It  is  because  of  his  character  that  he  has  no 
friends,  that  he  has  so  many  enemies  and,  indeed,  that  he  is 
here  in  St.  Helena." 

His  imperious  nature  brought  him  courtiers  but  denied 
him  friends.  He  persisted  in  holding  aloof  even  on  a  rock 
in  the  midst  of  the  ocean,  and  in  the  cow  shed  of  Longwood 
he  persisted  in  maintaining  a  mockery  of  court  ceremonials, 
under  the  direction  of  a  grand  marshal  of  the  palace.  All 
his  suite  were  required  to  array  themselves  as  if  for  attend- 
ance upon  him  at  the  Tuileries.  Even  his  physician  in  his 
last  illness  had  to  put  on  court  dress  before  entering  the 
chamber  of  death.  Every  head  must  be  uncovered  before 
him,  and  all  his  courtiers  were  commanded  to  remain  stand- 
ing in  his  presence,  hour  after  hour,  Gourgaud  having  to 
lean  against  the  door  to  keep  from  falling,  and  Bertrand  and 
Montholon  nearly  fainting  under  the  strain. 

The  imprisoned  Emperor  was  no  less  exacting  in  the  tasks 
he  set  his  followers  than  when  he  could  reward  his  servitors 
with  great  titles  and  rich  estates.  His  pent-up  energies  burst 
forth  in  a  torrent  of  letters  and  memoirs.  For  fourteen 
hours,  Montholon  wrote  and  wrote  at  his  dictation  until 
utterly  exhausted,  and  Las  Cases  read  and  wrote  for  him 
until  his  overtaxed  eyes  failed. 

He  took  long  English  lessons  from  the  Count,  but  while  he 
learned  how  to  read  the  extremely  unpleasant  things  the 
London  papers  were  saying  about  him,  he  did  not  acquire  the 


J^U.M.W  CUD 


The  Nameless  Gkave,  at  St.  Helena 


ST.  HELENA  463 

difficult  strategy  of  English  grammar,  as  one  may  see  from 
the  only  English  composition  by  him  which  has  survived : 

"Count  Lascases — Since  sixt  week  y  learn  the  English  and 
y  do  not  any  progress.  Sixt  week  do  fourty  and  two  days. 
It  might  have  learn  fivty  words,  for  day,  i  could  know  it  two 
tousands  and  two  hundred.  It  is  the  dictionary  more  of 
fourty  thousand;  even  he  could  most  twenty;  hot  much  of 
terns.  For  know  it  or  hundred  and  twenty  week,  which  do 
more  two  years.  After  this  you  shall  agree  that  the  study 
one  tongue  is  a  great  labour  who  it  must  do  into  the  young 
aged. 

"Longwood,  this  morning,  the  seven  march  thursday  one 
thousand  eight  hundred  sixteen  after  nativity  the  yors  Jesus 
Christ. 

"Count  Lascases,  Chamellan  of  the  S.  M.  Longwood;  into 
his  palac ;  very  press. ' ' 

Even  as  in  his  barrack  days,  so  at  St.  Helena,  Napoleon 
made  friends  only  with  books,  which  always  lay  thickly 
strewn  about  him.  Sometimes  he  sat  up  all  night  with  them. 
At  other  times  he  lay  on  his  couch  and  read  for  hours  with- 
out interruption. 

In  the  beginning  he  prided  himself  on  the  fortitude  with 
which  he  bore  his  exile.  He  seemed  indeed  disposed  to  make 
the  best  of  his  lot.  He  commended  the  very  simple  prepara- 
tions Admiral  Cockburn  had  made  for  his  comfort  at  Long- 
wood  and  as  he  had  captivated  Admiral  LTssher,  who  took  him 
to  Elba,  and  Captain  Maitland,  who  took  him  to  England,  he 
won  over  the  British  officials  at  St.  Helena  in  his  first  half 
year  there.  The  many  dignitaries  of  Great  Britain,  round- 
ing the  Cape  in  their  voyages  to  or  from  India  and  the  east, 
paid  court  to  him  at  Longwood  as  eagerly  as  if  he  were  still 
at  the  Tuileries  and  felt  highly  honoured  to  dine  at  his  table. 

No  doubt  he  M^as  then  cherishing  some  pleasing  illusions 
about  his  future,  hoping  that  a  new  ministry  in  London  might 
relent  and  permit  him  to  live  in  England,  or  even  that  the 
allied  sovereigns  might  find  it  necessary  to  recall  him  in  order 


464     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

to  still  the  rising  waves  of  another  great  revolution.  But  it 
was  his  misfortune  to  have  remained  a  live  and  exciting  politi- 
cal issue  throughout  Europe.  Thus  he  continued  to  arouse 
the  fear  and  hate  of  his  enemies  when  otherwise  he  might  have 
excited  their  compassion  and  appealed  to  their  magnanimity. 

Although  he  was  utterly  overthrown  and  marooned  in  the 
ocean,  the  crowned  heads  could  not  lie  easy  on  their  pillows 
while  party  factions  at  home  championed  his  cause.  In 
England,  Lord  Holland  and  some  of  the  foremost  men  in  the 
opposition  party  were  his  stout  defenders.  But  the  more  his 
case  was  agitated  the  more  rigorous  his  treatment  became. 

While  St.  Helena  was  not  a  paradise  without  a  serpent  be- 
fore the  advent  of  its  new  governor,  it  quickly  took  on  an 
unhappy  resemblance  to  a  penal  colony  after  the  arrival  of 
Sir  Hudson  Lowe,  in  April,  1816.  For  reasons  of  their  own, 
the  Tory  ministers  had  singled  out  this  honest  but  narrow 
person  to  be  Napoleon's  custodian  and  given  him  a  salary  of 
$60,000  a  year.  Coming  directly  from  those  who  chose  him, 
presumably  Sir  Hudson  brought  specific  instructions  to 
tighten  and  shorten  the  chains  of  the  imperial  prisoner. 

Napoleon's  instincts  were  aroused  against  the  governor 
the  moment  he  glanced  at  his  unprepossessing  countenance 
and  looked  into  an  eye  that  seemed  to  him  "like  the  eye  of 
a  hyena  caught  in  a  trap."  As  their  interviews  grew 
stormier.  Napoleon  grew  more  and  more  averse  to  exposing 
himself  to  those  provocative  encounters,  and  after  their  sixth 
meeting,  in  August,  he  announced  that  he  would  never  in 
the  future  receive  the  governor.  And  he  kept  his  vow.  Al- 
though the  two  men  continued  to  dwell  on  the  same  little 
speck  in  the  sea  for  nearly  five  years  more,  no  word  ever 
passed  between  them  again. 

Thenceforth  Lowe  enforced  without  gloves  the  increasingly 
harsh  orders  from  London.  That  the  fallen  Emperor  might 
hold  his  court  no  longer  and  freely  practise  his  magnetic  art 
upon  the  too  susceptible  British  voyagers,  no  one  was  per- 
mitted to  visit  Longwood  without  the  governor's  permission. 
That  the  prisoner  might  not  seduce  with  his  wiles  the  inhabit- 
ants of  the  island  and  by  their  aid  overthrow  the  British 


ST.  HELENA  465 

naval  fleet  and  army  garrison,  he  was  forbidden  to  enter  any 
house  or  speak  to  any  one  on  the  road  except  in  the  presence 
of  a  British  guard.  At  the  same  time  the  white  residents 
were  warned  that  if  one  among  them  should  speak  or  write 
to  any  person  in  the  Longwood  colony  he  would  be  deported, 
and  any  black  person  so  offending  was  threatened  with  100 
lashes  on  his  back.  All  letters  to  or  from  Longwood  must 
pass  through  the  governor's  hands  and  be  read  by  him. 

The  British  ministry  and  the  governor  were  constantly 
pursued  by  the  fear  that  Napoleon  would  escape  his  double 
prison  walls,  formed  by  the  sea  and  the  mountains.  It  is 
true  he  could  have  made  his  way  from  Longwood  only  by  a 
causeway  twenty  feet  wide  across  a  deep  ravine,  where  half 
a  dozen  sentries  could  stop  him,  and  he  could  have  left  the 
island  itself  only  by  embarking  at  some  one  of  the  three  or 
four  natural  harbours  on  the  precipitous  coast,  where  gun- 
boats always  were  on  guard. 

Nevertheless  Lowe  lined  those  little  harbours  with  land 
batteries  and  drew  around  Longwood  a  wall  of  bayonets  and 
howitzers.  At  sunset  the  guards  closed  in  upon  the  door- 
yard,  and  through  the  night,  sentinels  stood  about  the  house 
itself.  On  the  heights  overlooking  the  country,  watchmen 
were  posted  with  a  code  of  signals  that  enabled  the  governor 
to  know  of  every  move  Napoleon  made  from  the  moment  he 
stepped  out  of  his  door. 

Yet  no  evidence  has  been  found  that  he  had  any  thought  of 
attempting  to  escape  or  gave  a  word  of  encouragement  to  the 
several  fantastic  plans  for  liberating  him,  which  were  mostly 
hatched  in  the  United  States  and  which  kept  the  British  in  a 
continual  state  of  alarm.  In  the  first  place,  he  never,  even 
v/hile  he  lingered  in  France,  fancied  the  idea  of  going  to  the 
United  States.  America  was  too  far  from  Europe  in  those 
days  to  favour  his  sudden  reappearance  on  the  scene,  such  as 
he  made  from  Elba,  and  probably  it  seemed  too  soundly  demo- 
cratic to  appeal  to  his  imperial  ambitious.  And  no  doubt  his 
ego  shrank  with  terror  from  the  prospect  of  sinking  into  the 
condition  of  a  free  but  undistinguished  inhabitant  of  the  re- 
public. 


466     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

It  is  certain  that  he  would  rather  be  the  first  prisoner  in 
the  world  if  he  could  no  longer  be  the  first  sovereign.  As  he 
lost  hope  of  clemency,  he  took  on  the  hope  of  becoming  a  mar- 
tyr in  the  eyes  of  Europe  and  of  posterity,  and  he  made  the 
most  of  the  liberal  opportunity  the  British  ministers  gave 
him  to  appear  in  the  light  of  a  persecuted  man.  Thenceforth 
it  was  a  duel  between  him  and  his  jailor.  "My  martyrdom," 
he  really  rejoiced,  "will  do  more  than  all  else  to  restore  the 
crown  to  my  son."  And  it  is  within  the  pale  of  possibility 
that  the  uninspired  Tories  who  inspired  Sir  Hudson  Lowe 
were  the  creators  of  the  Second  Empire. 

As  a  protest  against  the  restrictions  and  espionage  pre- 
scribed for  him.  Napoleon  shut  himself  up  in  Longwood. 
For  four  years  he  did  not  mount  a  horse.  As  his  health 
began  to  fail,  he  stayed  indoors  for  long  periods,  when  he 
could  not  be  seen  by  his  British  guards.  He  not  only  de- 
clined to  see  Lowe,  but  when  the  commissioners  of  France, 
Austria  and  Russia  came  to  take  up  their  residence  at  St. 
Helena,  for  the  purpose  of  keeping  their  governments  in- 
formed, he  also  refused  to  exhibit  himself  to  them.  Count 
Balmain  of  Eussia  thought  indeed  that  he  caught  a  long-dis- 
tance glimpse  of  him  one  lucky  day,  and  Baron  Sturmer  of 
Austria  and  Count  Montchenu  of  France  were  sure  that  on 
another  fortimate  occasion,  as  they  were  hiding  in  a  ditch, 
they  saw  through  their  telescopes  a  small  man  in  a  three- 
cornered  hat.  The  poor  commissioners  never  were  able  to 
get  a  close  view  of  him  to  reward  them  for  their  years  of  exile 
on  the  island. 

The  great  powers  being  thus  baffled  and  mocked,  Pozzo  di 
Borgo  found  an  opportunity  to  thrust  his  stiletto  once  more 
into  his  old  Corsican  foe.  Pozzo  urged  the  outwitted  govern- 
ments to  insist  that  Napoleon  should  be  compelled  to  show 
himself  to  his  keepers  twice  a  day,  and  Europe  took  up  the 
demand  and  thundered  it. 

Nevertheless,  the  lone  prisoner  of  Longwood,  standing  at 
bay  in  his  hut,  defied  the  nations.  He  was  ailing  and  keep- 
ing to  his  room  at  the  time,  and  he  sent  out  the  warning  to 
Lowe  that  rather  than  submit  to  this  new  ignominy  he  would 


ST.  HELENA  467 

die  at  the  threshold  of  his  chamber.  Nor  did  he  ever  yield  the 
point,  and  a  British  army  captain  was  charged  with  the  duty 
of  peeping  in  at  him  through  the  windows.  Nothwithstand- 
ing  he  peeped  day  after  day,  some  days  keeping  his  eyes  glued 
to  the  panes  for  twelve  hours,  the  captain  could  not  be  posi- 
tive that  the  naked  figure  he  saw  coming  from  the  tub  was 
Napoleon 's  or  that  the  hand  he  saw  stropping  a  razor  another 
time  was  the  veritable  hand  that  once  ruled  Europe.  More- 
over, there  were  weeks  when  the  peeper  could  not  even  offer 
a  surmise  as  to  the  presence  of  the  prisoner,  and  IMontholon 
taunted  Lowe  with  not  knowing  positively  for  two  months 
that  Napoleon  still  was  at  Longwood. 

When  his  health  improved,  the  recluse  emerged  from  his 
retirement  in  the  winter  or  tropical  summer  of  1819-20  and, 
with  a  spasm  of  his  old  energy,  took  to  gardening.  Appear- 
ing at  sunrise  every  morning  and  ringing  a  big  bell,  he  sum- 
moned the  entire  household  to  the  new  task,  in  which  they 
were  aided  by  a  gang  of  Chinese  labourers.  Under  a  broad- 
rimmed  straw  hat  and  in  his  dressing  gown,  he  commanded 
the  workmen  with  his  walking  stick,  and  sometimes  himself 
took  in  hand  a  spade  or  a  watering  pot.  Fortifications  were 
thrown  up  to  defend  the  garden  plot  from  the  fierce  winds 
of  the  sea  and  cisterns  dug  to  catch  the  rains.  An  orchard 
was  set  out  and  an  avenue  of  willows  projected.  He  also 
indulged  again  in  a  little  horseback  exercise. 

Devoid  alike  of  a  sense  of  humour  and  a  sense  of  propor- 
tion, the  governor  and  his  restless  taskmasters  at  London  in- 
sisted no  more  sternly  on  keeping  Napoleon  from  returning 
to  his  throne  than  that  he  should  not  be  the  titular  Emperor 
even  of  the  cow  shed  of  Longwood.  The  prisoner  offered  to 
adopt  the  name  of  Colonel  IMuiron  or  Baron  Duroc,  but  the 
London  government  seemed  to  think  it  was  the  prerogative 
only  of  royalty  to  wear  an  incognito. 

A  book  inscribed  to  him  by  the  imperial  title  was  confis- 
cated and  some  chessmen,  which  were  sent  to  him  as  a  gift, 
were  threatened  with  the  same  fate  for  a  time  because  an  N 
and  a  crown  were  carved  on  them.  Even  some  green  and 
white  beans,  which  Montholon  gave  to  the  French  commis- 


468  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

sioner,  fell  under  Lowe's  suspicion  and  he  gravely  debated 
in  two  letters  to  his  superiors  in  London  whether  they  were 
not  a  dangerous  allusion  to  the  colours  of  the  Bonapartes 
and  the  Bourbons. 

The  government  surely  was  not  without  some  justification 
in  objecting  to  the  yearly  expenses  of  Longwood  out-running 
the  liberal  limit  of  $50,000  a  year.  When,  however,  a  mem- 
ber of  the  suite  reported  that  a  resident  had  expressed  his 
envy  of  the  exiles,  who  had  beef  every  day  while  the  poor 
islanders  could  indulge  their  appetite  for  it  only  three  or 
four  times  a  year,  Napoleon  laughingly  replied,  "You  ought 
to  have  told  him  that  it  cost  us  several  crowns!"  Upon 
Lowe  insisting  that  the  excess  above  the  $50,000  allowance 
should  be  met  out  of  Napoleon's  own  purse,  the  prisoner  broke 
up  his  silver  plate  and  sent  hundreds  of  pounds  of  the  frag- 
ments in  baskets  to  be  sold  at  Jamestown. 

The  governor  went  more  directly  at  what  was  perhaps  the 
real  object  of  his  superiors  in  this  agitation  when  he  began 
to  arrest  and  deport  the  members  of  the  Longwood  house- 
hold. First  he  arrested  Las  Cases  on  the  charge  of  having 
attempted  to  smuggle  a  letter  out  of  the  island  and  the  Count 
was  deported.  Finally  he  took  away  the  prisoner's  physi- 
cian. Dr.  O'Meara,  whose  habit  of  double  dealing  gave  the 
governor  the  desired  pretext.  O'Meara 's  successor,  Dr. 
Stokoe,  another  surgeon  in  the  British  navy,  quickly  fell  un- 
der Napoleon's  spell  and,  arousing  the  governor's  suspicion, 
he  was  court-martialed  and  dismissed  from  the  navy  after 
nearly  twenty  years'  service.  One  of  the  charges  preferred 
against  the  doctor  was  that  he  had  refused  to  employ  the 
words  ''General  Bonaparte"  in  his  reports  from  the  sick 
room,  for  now  Napoleon  was  a  painfully  sick  man,  and  had 
designated  him  simply  as  ''the  patient." 

Meanwhile  General  Gourgaud,  after  vainly  trying  to  get  up 
a  duel  with  Montholon,  voluntarily  sailed  away  to  Europe, 
but  with  a  secret  communication  from  Napoleon  in  the  soles 
of  his  boots.     The  Countess  de  Montholon  also  returned  home. 

Before  three  years  of  the  exile  had  passed,  a  full  half  of  the 
little  Longwood  colony  had  succumbed  to  homesickness  and 


The  Last  Days  of  Napoleon,  by  Vela 


The  Cajip  Bed  ox   Which   He   Died 
(Now  cherished  at  Mahiiaison) 


ST.  HELENA  469 

gone  away.  The  prisoner  fancied  that  in  the  end  no  one  but 
Marchand  would  remain  and  he  said  to  his  valet:  "You  will 
read  to  me  and  you  will  close  my  eyes." 

So  it  might  have  been  had  he  lived  a  little  longer.  For 
Montholon  keenly  felt  the  absence  of  his  wife,  and  he  and 
the  Bertrands,  too,  were  appealing  for  substitutes  to  relieve 
them  when  happily  death  came  to  the  relief  of  the  exile  him- 
self. 

In  much  of  the  latter  half  of  his  more  than  five  years  of 
exile,  Napoleon  was  in  the  painful  throes  of  cancer,  although 
his  disease  was  not  discovered  by  his  physicians.  The  bitter- 
ness of  the  duel  that  never  ceased  to  rage  between  him  and 
London  cut  him  off  from  the  sj'mpathy  and  consideration  of 
the  British  government,  and  even  to  the  last  it  was  supposed 
that  he  was  only  shamming.  A  political  motive  was  sus- 
pected in  his  every  action.  When  complaint  was  heard  of 
a  swarm  of  rats  that  invaded  Longwood,  running  about  the 
Emperor's  feet,  jumping  out  of  his  hat  when  he  picked  it 
up,  attacking  other  members  of  the  party  and  racing  and 
squealing  all  night,  the  colonial  secretary  in  London  hon- 
estly persuaded  himself  that  Napoleon  must  be  encouraging 
and  marshalling  the  rodents  in  order  to  give  him  another 
grievance.    . 

Among  all  his  brother  sovereigns  the  only  one  to  speak  a 
word  of  pity  was  he  who  had  the  most  to  forgive.  With 
Christian  charity,  Pius  VII  listened  to  the  prayers  of  the 
afflicted  mother  of  the  prisoner  and  appealed  to  the  prince 
regent  of  England  and  the  allied  monarchs  for  the  alleviation 
of  the  banished  Emperor's  hard  lot. 

The  British  government  consented  to  permit  a  friendly 
physician  and  two  priests  to  go  to  St.  Helena,  and  Cardinal 
Fesch  chose  three  Corsicans,  Dr.  Antommarchi  and  Fathers 
Vignali  and  Buonavita.  While  Father  Vignali  heard  his 
confession  and  at  the  last  gave  hira  the  sacraments  of  the 
church,  the  newcomers  did  not  prove  to  be  agreeable  com- 
panions for  Napoleon.  He  remained  indifferent  to  the  simple 
priests  and  could  not  give  his  confidence  or  his  respect  to  the 
doctor. 


470  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Doctors  O'Meara  and  Stokoe  had  diagnosed  his  ailment  as 
a  disease  of  the  liver  and  he  regarded  himself  as  a  victim  of 
the  St.  Helena  climate.  Antommarchi,  however,  did  not  view 
the  symptoms  with  much  gravity.  In  the  levity  of  his  char- 
acter, this  new  doctor  actually  mocked  the  frightful  suffer- 
ings of  his  patient,  which  he  fancied  were  only  stimulated  in 
the  hope  of  gaining  the  sympathy  of  the  world  and  a  return 
to  Europe.  When  Napoleon  told  him  of  the  stabbing  pains 
in  his  side,  where  cancerous  ulcers  were  cutting  their  way 
unsuspected  by  the  five  physicians  who  first  and  last  had 
attended  him,  Antommarchi  only  laughed  at  him  and  gave 
him  a  drastic  purge  of  tartar  emetic  that  caused  the  sick  man 
to  writhe  on  the  floor. 

Even  in  the  month  before  the  end,  when  Napoleon  reclined 
in  his  chair,  stricken  and  cold,  his  memory  gone  and  his  mind 
wandering,  an  English  doctor  doubted  the  seriousness  of  his 
condition  and  told  him  to  get  up  and  shave,  his  beard  being 
long  and  giving  his  face  an  uncanny  appearance.  The  dying 
man  could  only  feebly  plead  his  helplessness. 

Lord  Bathurst,  the  colonial  secretary  in  London,  was  seized 
most  inopportunely  with  a  new  alarm  and  warned  Lowe  that 
he  had  strong  reasons  for  believing  that  "General  Bonaparte" 
was  seriously  cherishing  an  idea  of  escaping  from  St.  Helena. 
It  was  true.  The  prisoner  of  Longwood  well  knew  that  the 
hour  of  his  deliverance  was  fast  approaching.  ''England 
calls  for  my  corpse, ' '  he  said  three  weeks  before  his  spirit  sur- 
rendered it;  "I  will  not  keep  her  waiting." 

In  the  sixth  year  of  his  captivity,  he  limped  into  the  draw- 
ing room  to  pass  his  few  remaining  days.  There,  while  Mon- 
tholon  watched  by  him  at  night,  he  heard  him  murmur  in  his 
delirium,  "France  tete  d'Armee!" — head  of  the  army — and 
saw  him  suddenly  spring  up  from  his  cot,  the  cot  on  which 
he  had  slept  at  Austerlitz — and  at  Waterloo.  The  Count  laid 
a  restraining  hand  on  him,  but  with  a  fitful  burst  of  that  en- 
ergy which  had  shaken  thrones,  the  delirious  man  seized  him 
and  dragged  him  to  the  floor.  It  was  Napoleon's  last  struggle, 
and  thenceforth  throughout  the  day,  he  lay  motionless  on  his 
little  camp  bed,  thirty  inches  wide. 


I 


ST.  HELENA  471 

It  was  May  5,  1821. 

About  the  dying  Emperor,  stood  his  grand  marshal  and 
Mme.  Bertrand,  with  their  children;  Count  de  Montholon, 
Marehand  and  St.  Denis,  with  others  of  the  servants.  In  the 
next  room,  Father  Vignali  knelt  at  the  altar. 

The  sun  was  setting  behind  black  clouds  which  had  rolled  in 
from  the  wind-swept  Atlantic  and  burst  upon  St.  Helena. 
The  furious  storm  like  the  roar  of  mighty  batteries,  terrified 
the  islanders,  who  were  almost  unacquainted  with  the  sound  of 
thunder.  The  tents  of  the  British  Guards  at  Longwood  were 
blown  away  and  the  cordon  of  picket  ships  made  for  the 
open  sea. 

At  eleven  minutes  before  six,  when  the  tempest  was  beating 
loudest  against  the  walls  of  Longwood,  the  exile  made  his 
final  escape.  As  the  tormented  soul  took  flight,  the  calmness 
and  beauty  of  youth  overspread  the  classic  countenance  on 
the  pillow,  leaving  no  trace  of  the  restless  ambitions  and  tur- 
bulent passions  that  so  long  had  troubled  it. 

Napoleon  himself  had  framed  the  letter  of  notification  which 
was  despatched  to  the  governor.  An  autopsy  was  held  by 
the  physicians  who  had  failed  to  diagnose  the  fatal  disease. 
They  found  that  the  liver  was  only  slightly  enlarged  but  that 
the  stomach  was  terribly  ravaged  by  a  cancerous  growth. 
The  heart,  which  proved  to  be  remarkably  small,  was  removed 
in  accordance  with  the  request  of  Napoleon,  who  directed  that 
it  should  be  delivered  to  Marie  Louise.  The  governor,  how- 
ever, refused  to  let  it  be  carried  from  the  island  until  it  had 
been  duly  released  by  the  British  government. 

A  grave  was  dug  in  a  spot  chosen  by  the  Emperor  beside 
a  spring  and  beneath  the  shade  of  two  willows  in  a  deep 
ravine,  then  called  the  Devil's  Punchbowl,  but  thenceforth 
more  agreeably  known  as  Geranium  Valley.  Some  slabs  of 
stone,  torn  from  the  kitchen  floor  at  Longwood,  were  selected 
for  the  covering  of  the  tomb,  and  the  mourning  followers 
wished  to  carve  upon  it  merely  the  name.  Napoleon.  The 
governor,  however  forbade  the  inscription  as  too  imperial,  un- 
less the  surname  Bonaparte  were  added,  and  the  stone  was 
left  bare. 


472     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

The  sword  of  the  conqueror  and  the  cloak  he  wore  at  Ma- 
rengo were  laid  on  the  coffin,  which,  on  the  fourth  day  after 
death,  was  borne  from  Longwood  in  a  rude  funeral  car,  and 
as  the  Great  Captain  was  laid  to  rest  in  the  melancholy  vale, 
British  guns  volleyed  across  his  nameless  grave. 


CHAPTER  LII 

L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BONAPARTES 

AFTER  marching  through  blood  and  fire  from  Cadiz  to 
Moscow,  in  his  ambition  to  found  a  Bonaparte  dynasty, 
Napoleon  bequeathed  to  his  race  only  a  crown  of  sor- 
row and  a  heritage  of  misfortune.  While  he  lingered  in 
captivity  within  the  gigantic  walls  of  St.  Helena,  his  son  was 
not  less  a  prisoner  in  his  grandfather's  palace  at  Vienna,  and 
his  brothers  and  sisters,  whom  he  had  thrust  into  the  sacred 
circle  of  royalty,  were  branded  as  outcasts  by  the  old  reign- 
ing families  of  Europe,  who  condemned  them  to  wander  over 
the  earth  with  their  trunks  for  their  thrones. 

If  those  parvenu  princes  and  princesses  were  despised  by 
the  triumphant  sovereigns,  the  four-year-old  King  of  Rome 
inspired  a  dread  in  every  palace  and  cabinet  of  Europe.  For 
he  was  the  eagle's  own  fledgling  and  half  a  Hapsburg  besides. 
Wherefore  the  little  eagle  languished  a  captive  in  his  gilded 
cage. 

In  imitation  of  Napoleon,  the  allied  monarchs  determined 
to  make  themselves  the  masters  of  Europe.  He  had  attempted 
to  unite  the  nations  in  a  great  federation,  under  his  sole  rule, 
and  they  determined  to  revive  the  federation  under  their 
joint  rule.  To  that  end,  they  formed  the  celebrated  Holy  Alli- 
ance, which  was  inaugurated  by  Czar  Alexander  I  and  which 
was  joined  by  virtually  all  the  sovereigns  on  the  continent. 
With'  the  establishment  of  that  league,  the  kings  thought 
they  had  secured  for  all  time  the  reign  of  peace  under  their 
authority. 

Only  the  fear  that  the  French  volcano  might  again  burst 
forth  troubled  the  counsels  of  the  Allies.  They  were  sure 
there  was  no  danger  as  long  as  Louis  XVIII  lolled  on  the 
throne;  but  they  well  knew  that  the  King  could  be  ejected 

473 


474     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

from  the  Tuileries  as  readily  now  as  when  Napoleon  returned 
from  Elba.  At  the  thought  that  the  exiled  Emperor  might 
even  scale  the  walls  of  St.  Helena  and  swim  across  the  ocean, 
they  furiously  demanded  in  their  meeting  at  Aix  la  Cha- 
pelle  in  1818  that  he  should  show  himself  to  his  custodians 
twice  a  day. 

Even  when  the  welcome  news  came  that  the  prisoner  of 
Longwood  lay  in  the  nameless  grave  beneath  the  willows,  they 
still  could  not  rest  at  ease.  For  there  was  another  Napoleon 
at  Vienna,  and  all  the  while  they  had  been  hardly  less  fearful 
and  watchful  of  him.  Their  suspicion  and  alarm  obliged  his 
grandfather  to  immure  the  boy  within  his  palace  walls  and 
his  timid  mother  was  frightened  into  abandoning  him. 

A  faint  and  pathetic  shadow  on  the  pages  of  history  is  poor 
I'Aiglon,  the  pale  shade  of  his  mighty  sire.  That  he  might 
be  born,  an  Empress  was  dethroned  and  the  proudest  imperial 
race  in  the  world  gave  its  daughter  to  a  Corsican  plebeian, 
whereat  Emperors  quarrelled,  Russia  was  invaded,  Moscow 
burned,  and  the  Cossacks  raced  across  Europe  and  broke  down 
the  gates  of  Paris.  His  first  wail  was  heard  round  the  earth ; 
kings  kneeling  by  his  crib  of  gold  acclaimed  him  the  inheritor 
of  the  loftiest  throne  and  the  widest  domain  of  modem  times, 
and  the  crown  of  Rome  was  placed  upon  his  infant  brow. 

Now,  while  j^et  in  his  lisping  childhood,  his  crown  and  his 
inheritance  were  gone,  his  father  was  taken  from  him  and 
he  was  all  but  deserted  by  his  mother.  Snatched  from  his 
home,  he  was  deprived  of  his  French  courtiers  and  servants 
and  carried  into  a  foreign  country.  There  he  was  not  per- 
mitted to  see  a  familiar  face  but  was  surrounded  by  strangers 
who  spoke  a  strange  language,  under  orders  to  wean  him 
from  his  mother  tongue. 

Living  in  his  grandfather's  palace  at  Schonbrunn  at  the 
edge  of  Vienna,  he  seems  to  have  had  no  playmates  for  fear 
they  would,  with  boyish  frankness,  remind  him  of  the  destiny 
to  which  he  had  been  dedicated  in  his  cradle.  Even  his  little 
toys  were  put  away  lest  they  keep  alive  a  recollection  of  his 
nursery  in  the  Tuileries. 

His  very  name  was  denied  and  he  was  no  longer  Napoleon 


L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BONAPARTES  475 

Francis  Charles,  but  Joseph  Carl  Franz,  being  addressed  as 
Franz  in  the  family  circle  of  the  Hapsburgs.  The  proud 
title  of  Roi  de  Rome  was  likewise  changed  to  Herzog  von 
Reichstadt.  In  the  official  patent  creating  his  Austrian  duke- 
dom, his  paternity  was  ignored  as  if  he  were  the  unlawful 
child  of  JMarie  Louise  by  an  unknown  father.  And,  after  the 
manner  of  illegitimate  children  of  princes  and  princesses,  he 
did  not  rank  as  a  member  of  the  imperial  family. 

Even  all  that  remorseless  obliteration  of  the  identity  of  the 
young  Napoleon  did  not  suffice  to  allay  the  anxieties  of  the 
Grand  Alliance.  That  body  demanded  that  he  must  be  cut 
off  from  the  succession  to  his  mother's  little  duchy  of  Parma 
and  not  be  permitted  even  to  live  with  her,  where  his  pres- 
ence might  enlist  the  sympathy  and  support  of  oNIarie  Louise's 
subjects.  The  Allies  insisted  that  there  must  be  no  possi- 
bility left  for  the  son  of  Napoleon  to  inherit  the  smallest 
sovereignty  anywhere. 

Nor  was  that  enough.  When  the  Emperor  Francis  of  Aus- 
tria announced  that  he  would  make  his  grandson  the  Duke 
of  Reichstadt  and  confer  certain  estates  on  him  and  his  heirs, 
that  mere  suggestion  of  posterity  inspired  the  Grand  Alliance 
with  a  new  terror.  Pozzo  di  Borgo  took  the  lead  among  those 
who  demanded  that  the  Napoleonic  race  should  be  exter- 
minated. The  Duke  must  be  thrust  into  the  church  under  a 
vow  of  celibacy,  or  at  least  be  forbidden  ever  to  marry. 

The  grandfather,  however,  did  not  yield  to  that  extreme 
demand.  But  when  he  issued  the  ducal  patent  he  omitted 
all  disturbing  references  to  the  heirs  of  the  Duke. 

"With  the  nations  dreading  and  his  own  maternal  kindred 
regretting  his  existence ;  amidst  plots  for  his  assassination, 
which  were  fomented  by  a  hatred  of  his  blood,  and  plots  for 
his  abduction,  which  were  concocted  by  enthusiastic  Bona- 
partists  in  France;  breathing  an  atmosphere  of  mystery  and 
suspicion;  detecting  concealment  in  every  face  and  awkward 
avoidances  in  every  conversation,  the  little  eagle  grew  up. 
The  creature  and  the  victim  of  his  extraordinary  environ- 
ment, he  passed  from  shyness  to  taciturnity,  from  fear  to 
deceit,  and  became  the  baffling  problem  of  the  corps  of  solemn 


476     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

pedagogues  who  were  chosen  to  eradicate  any  dangerous 
atavistic  traits  in  his  nature  while  they  moulded  him  into  an 
Austrian  and  a  Hapsburg. 

Notwithstanding  the  oblivion  in  which  his  origin  was  studi- 
ously wrapped,  he  continued  for  a  time  to  talk  of  "when  I 
used  to  be  a  king, ' '  and  he  persisted  in  the  habit  of  including 
his  father  in  his  prayers,  since  no  one  appeared  to  have  the 
hardihood  to  forbid  him.  When  those  who  constantly  watched 
him  were  gratified  to  find  his  childish  thoughts  of  his  exiled 
parent  growing  dim,  his  interest  would  be  revived  by  some 
passing  boy  shouting,  "Look  at  the  little  Napoleon!" 

The  child  knew  that  his  father  had  been  the  Emperor  of 
the  French,  but  with  a  secret  shame  he  suspected  that  he  had 
been  "sent  away"  as  a  criminal  for  something  he  had  done. 
It  was  not  until  he  was  nearly  seven  that  he  made  bold  to 
question  one  of  his  teachers  directly,  and  this  pathetic  dia- 
logue took  place :  ' '  My  father  is  in  the  East  Indies,  I  think  ? ' ' 
"Ah,  no,  it  is  not  so."  "Perhaps  he  is  in  America?" 
' ' Why  should  he  be  there ? "  " Where  is  he  then ? "  "I  can- 
not tell  you."  "It  seems  to  me  I  have  heard  it  said  he  was 
in  exile  ? "  "  What  ?  In  exile  ? "  "  Yes. "  "  How  could  that 
be  possible?" 

Thus  put  off,  the  little  Duke  retired  within  himself  again, 
but  only  to  emerge  in  a  few  days  with  the  comment,  "Napo- 
leon must  have  been  a  famous  general ! ' '  And  he  added  the 
question,  ' '  Why  is  he  no  longer  Emperor  ? ' '  The  teacher  re- 
plied that  all  the  powers  had  made  war  against  him  because 
he  tried  to  usurp  the  whole  world.  Then  the  boy  returned 
once  more  to  the  subject  of  his  consuming  curiosity  with  the 
remark,  "I  have  always  heard  he  is  in  Africa." 

In  despair  of  his  forgetting  his  father,  his  guardian  ap- 
pealed to  Emperor  Francis,  who  commissioned  Metternich, 
of  all  men,  to  have  a  long  talk  with  the  youth  about  Napo- 
leon. By  an  equally  ironical  choice,  the  Duke  was  to  hear, 
when  he  was  older,  a  review  of  his  father's  campaigns  by 
Marmont,  the  first  marshal  to  betray  the  Emperor. 

When  the  report  came  to  Vienna  that  the  exile  of  St. 
Helena  had  been  liberated,  I'Aiglon  was  a  handsome  boy  of 


L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BONAPARTES  477 

ten,  and  had  now  fully  succeeded  in  penetrating  the  mystery 
which  had  enveloped  his  paternity.  The  teacher  who  broke 
to  the  Duke  the  news  of  Napoleon's  death  was  surprised  that 
he  should  shed  so  many  tears  for  a  father  whom  he  had  not 
seen  since  as  a  child  of  three  the  Emperor  took  him  in  his 
arms  and  kissed  him  good-bye,  before  departing  on  the  dis- 
astrous French  campaign  of  1814.  But  Metternich  advised 
the  father-in-law  that  it  would  not  do  to  permit  mourning 
for  one  who  had  been  civilly  dead  six  years. 

Marie  Louise  did  not  pay  to  the  dead  exile  the  tribute  of  a 
widow's  tears  when  the  Emperor  Francis  notified  his  daugh- 
ter that  ''General  Bonaparte"  was  no  more.  The  reply  of 
the  ex-Empress  who  now  reigned  at  Parma  as  the  sovereign 
of  a  little  Italian  duchy,  is  a  strange  document: 

I  confess  I  was  extremely  shocked.  Although  I  never  had  any 
deep  feeling  for  him,  I  cannot  forget  that  he  is  the  father  of  my 
son,  and  that  far  from  treating  me  badly,  as  the  world  seems  to 
think,  he  always  showed  me  the  greatest  consideration,  which,  after 
all,  is  all  that  one  should  expect  from  a  poHtieal  marriage.  I  was, 
therefore,  very  much  grieved,  and  although  there  is  reason  to  be 
glad  that  he  ended  his  unhappy  life  as  a  Christian  should,  I  would 
have  wished  him  many  more  years  of  happiness  and  life — provided 
they  were  lived  apart  from  me. 

That  concluding  sentiment  may  sound  unnecessarily  harsh, 
but  it  was  the  very  truth.  It  would  have  been  most  annoy- 
ing had  Napoleon  returned  to  live  again  with  his  wife,  for  in 
anticipation  of  widowhood  she  had  given  her  left  hand  to 
Count  Neipperg  and  taken  a  second  husband  the  year  before. 
Never  in  his  tortuous  career  did  Metternich  make  a  shrewder 
choice  of  an  agent  than  when,  at  Napoleon's  first  downfall,  he 
commissioned  the  Count  to  alienate  the  thoughts  of  ]\Iarie 
Louise  from  her  husband. 

When  Dr.  Antommarchi  appeared  at  Parma  she  declined 
to  see  that  messenger  from  St.  Helena  and  asked  him  to  give 
her  first  husband's  dying  message  to  the  second  husband. 
The  exile  had  wished  to  send  her  a  still  more  substantial  token 
of  his  affection  and  had  requested  Antommarchi  to  "place 


1 


478     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

my  heart  in  spirits  of  wine  and  take  it  to  my  beloved  Marie 
Louise."  Fortunately  for  her,  Sir  Hudson  Lowe  had  vigi- 
lantly prevented  the  escape  of  that  organ,  but  Dr.  Antom- 
marchi  wished  her  to  demand  it  from  the  Holy  Alliance. 
She  was  naturally  quite  upset  by  this  awkward  situation. 
She  implored  her  father  to  see  that  the  heart  was  left  in  St. 
Helena,  because  if  it  should  be  brought  to  Parma  it  would 
give  her  a  "fresh  shock"  and  besides  attract  crowds  of  pil- 
grims. 

For  two  years  at  a  time  I'Aiglon  did  not  look  upon  his 
mother,  and  she  became  to  him  a  stranger  whom  he  met  and 
parted  from  without  emotion.  His  childhood  and  boyhood 
were  passed  almost  wholly  among  men,  charged  to  take  every 
care  that  he  should  not  moult  into  a  full-fledged  eagle. 

"While  he  silently  peered  out  upon  a  world  that  had  seemed 
to  ban  him,  musing  in  the  paths  of  Schonbrunn,  or  reflect- 
ing alone  in  his  little  log  house  in  the  palace  park,  the  Bona- 
partists  rallied  around  his  name  and  sedulously  kept  alive  his 
memory  in  France.  When  it  was  suspected  that  Gourgaud 
was  coming  on  a  mission  to  the  young  Napoleon,  Metternich 
ordered  that  he  should  be  turned  back  from  the  frontier. 
Again,  a  French  emissary  tried  to  open  communication  with 
him  by  tossing  into  his  passing  carriage  a  letter  which  an- 
nounced, "Sire!  30,000,000  subjects  await  your  return." 
But  the  boy's  watchful  custodian  grabbed  the  letter  so  quickly 
that  he  thought  the  Prince  had  not  even  noticed  the  incident. 

Poets  smote  their  lyres  to  "The  Son  of  the  Man,"  and, 
although  the  Bourbon  police  raided  the  Paris  shops  time  and 
again,  perfumery  bottles,  drinking  glasses,  snuff  boxes,  knives, 
handkerchiefs,  pipes  and  all  manner  of  personal  articles  bear- 
ing I'Aiglon 's  portrait  found  their  way  into  French  pockets 
and  French  homes.  Even  in  Vienna,  Metternich  was  dis- 
turbed by  the  appearance  of  gloves,  on  which  the  boy's  like- 
ness had  been  stamped,  and  the  police  seized  them.  While 
one  faction  thus  was  trying  to  thrust  a  crown  upon  the  Duke, 
another  faction  was  supposed  to  be  planning  his  assassination, 
and  Savary  sent  a  warning  to  Metternich  that  Pozzo  di  Borgo 
was  a  member  of  a  conspiracy  to  murder  the  heir  of  Napoleon. 


L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BONAPARTES  479 

When  the  French  national  spirit  had  sufficiently  revived 
to  throw  off  the  Bourbons,  and  the  nation  was  on  the  eve  of 
the  Revolution  of  1830,  the  Bonapartists  besought  the  Aus- 
trian government  to  free  the  captive  eaglet  and  let  him  fly- 
to  the  waiting  throne.  Many  dispassionate  observers  were 
convinced  that  I'Aiglon  needed  only  to  appear  in  France  to 
receive  the  crown ;  but  the  Hapsburgs  dared  not  consult  their 
own  family  interests  and  gain  the  French  throne.  Thus  in 
spite  of  all  the  dreams  and  schemes  of  the  Bonapartists,  not 
I'Aiglon  but  Louis  Philippe  of  the  House  of  Orleans  profited 
by  the  Revolution  and  became  the  Citizen  King  of  the  French. 

At  that  time  the  Duke  was  preparing  to  enter  upon  a  mili- 
tary career  under  the  Austrian  flag.  As  he  impatiently  ap- 
proached the  end  of  his  tutelage,  his  teachers  sounded  many 
alarms  and  apparently  were  extremely  apprehensive  about 
his  future.  His  chief  tutor  described  his  character  as  weak 
and  his  education  imperfect,  speaking  of  his  "want  of  bal- 
ance," his  "unbridled  passions  and  obstinacy,"  and  his 
"crude  and  distorted  ideas."  The  pedagogue  did  not  how- 
ever, make  all  the  entries  on  the  debtor  side  of  the  Duke's 
ledger.  On  the  contrary,  he  conceded  his  "engaging  appear- 
ance," his  "fascinating  and  often  impressive  observations" 
and  "all  that  stamps  him  as  belonging  to  a  special  order." 

The  Duke  himself  once  or  twice  dropped  his  reticence  con- 
cerning his  inner  thoughts  and  left  us  a  fleeting  view  of  the 
ambition  that  glimmered  within  his  prisoned  body.  "When  he 
was  sixteen  he  received  a  letter  from  Count  Neipperg  urging 
him  more  diligently  to  study  the  French  language,  which  he 
had  all  but  lost.  The  Duke  replied  approvingly  to  the  Count, 
whom  he  probably  never  suspected  of  being  his  stepfather: 
"It  (French)  is  the  language  in  which  my  father  gave  the 
word  of  command  in  all  his  battles,  in  which  his  name  was 
covered  with  glory  and  in  which  he  has  left  us  unparalleled 
memoirs  of  the  art  of  war,  while  to  the  last  he  expressed  the 
wish  that  I  should  never  repudiate  the  nation  into  which  I 
was  born." 

Again  he  vowed,  "The  chief  aim  of  my  life  must  be  not  to 
remain  unworthy  of  my  father's  fame."     On  another  occa- 


480  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

sion  he  said  to  a  man  in  tones  of  deepest  gratitude,  "You 
defended  my  father 's  honour  at  a  time  when  all  men  vied  with 
one  another  to  slander  his  name.  I  have  read  your  'Battle 
of  Waterloo,'  and  in  order  to  impress  its  every  line  on  my 
memory  I  translated  it  twice — into  French  and  Italian." 

At  twenty  the  Duke  was  removed  from  the  custody  of  his 
teachers,  but  only  to  be  placed  under  the  surveillance  of  a 
group  of  army  officers.  Yet  the  Hapsburgs  pretended  to  be- 
lieve that  amid  all  those  fetters  they  were  really  rearing  an 
eagle,  another  Napoleon  who,  at  the  head  of  the  Austrian 
army,  would  prove  himself  the  first  soldier  in  the  world.  His 
sour  old  preceptor-in-chief  was  sure  that  his  pupil  could  be 
made  "the  worthy  heir  of  his  father's  fame,"  and  "a  pow- 
erful upholder  of  the  Austrian  state."  On  every  hand  un- 
bounded hopes  were  professed  of  the  soaring  heights  which 
he  would  achieve.  Yet  the  Emperor  and  Metternich  dared 
not  let  him  go  to  Prague  or  leave  Vienna  for  fear  the  little 
eagle  might  homeward  fly! 

At  court  balls  his  appearance  aroused  curiosity  such  as  no 
Hapsburg  excited.  His  beautiful  face  and  ready  wit  con- 
quered men  and  women  alike.  As  he  went  to  his  barracks, 
the  Viennese  stood  at  their  windows  to  see  the  tall,  distin- 
guished, and  nobly  seated  horseman  gallop  by.  The  soldiers 
broke  the  decorum  of  the  drill  ground  to  greet  him  with  ring- 
ing cheers  whenever  he  presented  himself  before  them. 

The  young  officer  displayed  so  much  zeal  and  generally  such 
a  fiery  temperament  in  his  military  duties  that  he  neglected 
to  rest  and  slighted  his  meals.  His  physician  counselled  pru- 
dence and  warned  him  that  he  had  a  spirit  of  iron  in  a  body 
of  crystal.  For  the  youth  had  grown  too  fast  and  he  had  the 
too  narrow  chest  of  the  Hapsburg  race. 

After  an  ailing  time  in  bed,  when  his  physicians  failed  to 
detect  his  tubercular  symptoms,  he  went  driving  on  the 
Prater.  It  was  a  raw  cold  day  in  the  spring  of  1832  and,  his 
carriage  breaking  down,  he  started  to  walk  home  but  sank 
fainting  in  the  street.  When  he  returned  to  his  sick  bed  he 
quickly  fell  a  prey  to  tuberculosis. 

Week  after  week  he  strove  for  life  with  rapidly  increasing 


L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BOXAPARTES  481 

feebleness.  Still  his  mother,  presumably  absorbed  in  her  new 
family  at  Parma,  did  not  come  to  see  him.  Afterward  when 
she  did  visit  Austria,  she  tarried  with  her  father  at  Trieste 
and  long  deferred  the  remaining  short  journey  to  Vienna. 

When  Metternich  visited  the  Duke  and  saw  what  a  ''terrible 
wreck"  he  was,  he  wrote  to  the  Emperor  insisting  that  Marie 
Louise  must  hasten  to  the  side  of  her  son.  Only  then  did  she 
awaken  to  her  maternal  duty,  so  much  had  she  grown  apart 
from  her  old  life  and  from  her  boy. 

The  last  night  came,  when  the  soul  of  I'Aiglon  beat  against 
the  wasted  and  broken  bars  of  its  bodily  cage.  He  lay  in  the 
great  frescoed  room  where,  after  the  victory  of  AYagram,  his 
father  had  dictated  terms  of  peace  to  his  grandfather  and  had 
dreamed  of  demanding  a  daughter  of  the  Caesars  to  give  him 
an  heir  to  his  empire  and  his  glory.  Marie  Louise  slept,  and 
only  a  valet,  not  even  a  doctor,  watched  and  heard  the  de- 
lirious murmurings  of  the  dying  youth, 

"Call  my  mother!  Call  my  mother!"  he  hoarsely  whis- 
pered as  the  dawning  summer  day  lit  up  the  big,  empty  room, 
and  he  felt  himself  sinking  with  no  hand  but  a  valet's  to 
grasp.  It  was  not  thus  that  he  had  come  into  the  world. 
Then  the  dignitaries  of  an  empire  crowded  about  the  bed ; 
Paris  anxiously  listened  for  the  100  guns  of  the  Invalides  and 
all  Europe  hearkened  to  his  birth  cry.  Now  he  was  sighing 
away  his  poor,  fruitless  life  in  a  deserted  chamber. 

The  valet  called  a  member  of  the  Duke's  staff  and  a  physi- 
cian. They,  however,  hesitated  to  break  in  upon  Marie 
Louise's  sleep  and  the  mother  was  not  summoned  until  her 
boy's  lips  were  silent  and  his  eyes  fixed.  Kneeling  by  his  bed- 
side at  the  administration  of  the  sacrament  of  extreme  unc- 
tion,, she  rose  only  when  told  that  I'Aiglon  had  taken  flight 
and  was  free  at  last. 

She  had  hardly  more  than  gone  when  the  palace  crowd 
began  to  stream  into  the  chamber  and  seize  upon  souvenirs 
of  the  dead.  In  an  hour  they  had  almost  stripped  his  room, 
carrying  off  his  sticks  and  whips  and  ruthlessly  snipping  his 
yellow  curls  until  his  head  was  shorn  of  most  of  its  hair. 

When  death  thus  claimed  the  son  of  IMarie  Louise  it  brought 


482  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

a  strange  revenge  to  the  memory  of  the  divorced  Josephine. 
For  now  her  grandson,  Louis  Napoleon,  the  only  surviving 
son  of  Hortense,  became  the  heir  to  the  overturned  throne  of 
the  Empire  and  the  hope  of  the  proscribed  and  scattered 
Bonapartes. 

At  the  fall  of  Napoleon,  ]\Ime,  Mere  in  her  refuge  at  Kome 
had  become  the  real  head  of  the  family.  In  prosperity 
her  children  had  smiled  at  the  prudent  counsels  of  this 
simple,  thrifty  woman  who  in  poverty,  had  reared  them  by 
patching  and  scrubbing.  "When  adversity  came  once  more 
they  turned  to  her  again  and  placed  themselves  under  her 
stem  maternal  rule.  She  had  saved  more  than  any  of  them 
from  a  disaster  which  she  had  always  foretold,  and  they  no 
longer  were  ashamed  of  her  parsimony. 

To  Napoleon  she  offered  all  she  had,  because  she  said  she 
owed  it  all  to  him.  "What  does  it  matter?"  she  argued. 
"When  I  shall  have  nothing  left,  I  shall  take  my  stick  and 
go  about  begging  alms  for  Napoleon's  mother." 

]\Ime.  Mere  was  seventy-one  when  called  to  mourn  the 
death  of  the  Emperor.  It  was  her  sorrowful  fortune  to 
survive  many  who  were  dear  to  her.  Her  daughter  Elisa, 
the  former  Grand  Duchess  of  Tuscany,  died  the  year  before, 
and  her  daughter  Pauline,  the  Princess  Borghese,  four  years 
after  Napoleon.  Death  next  claimed  I'Aiglon,  her  heir,  the 
rose  and  expectancy  of  her  old  age.  Then  Saveria,  the  long- 
time companion  who  in  plainer  days  had  shared  the  house- 
hold labours  at  Ajaccio,  was  taken  from  her. 

As  unbending  before  the  frowns  as  she  had  been  before  the 
smiles  of  fortune,  sustained  by  her  maternal  pride  in  having 
given  to  the  world  a  master,  ]\Ime.  Mere  remained  an  active 
and  familiar  figure  in  the  streets  and  parks  and  churches  of 
Rome  until,  at  80,  she  tripped  and  broke  her  hip.  For  six 
years  more  she  tarried,  a  cripple  in  a  world  of  graves.  Ly- 
ing at  full  length  on  a  mattress  in  her  carriage,  she  persisted 
for  a  time  in  driving  about  the  noble  city.  At  home  in  her 
old  palazzo  on  the  Corso,  which  still  is  marked  out  on  the 
guide  books  of  Rome,  her  favourite  post  was  by  a  window, 
and  Romans   and   travellers   from   all   parts   of   the   world 


L'AIGLON  AND  THE  BONAPARTES  483 

paused  in  the  Piazza  Venezia  to  gaze  up  at  the  mother  of 
Napoleon.  Blindness  was  added  to  her  afiflictions,  but  with 
a  motherly  smile  she  turned  her  sightless  eyes  still  to  the  bust 
of  the  Emperor,  always  by  her  side. 

"I  am  indeed  a  Mater  Dolorosa,"  she  sighed,  as  she  called 
again  and  again  the  roll  of  her  dead,  until  at  last  the  hand 
of  mercy  wrote  her  own  name  upon  it.  Four  sons  and  a 
daughter  outlived  this  mother  of  kings.  Caroline  and  Lucien, 
who  are  believed  to  have  died,  like  Napoleon  and  like  their 
father,  of  cancer  of  the  stomach,  and  Joseph  and  Louis  fol- 
lowed her  in  the  course  of  ten  years ;  but  Jerome  lagged  super- 
fluous, well  into  the  Second  Empire. 

Perhaps  Marie  Louise's  closing  years  were  no  less  tragic 
than  her  mother-in-law's,  if  the  story  of  them  could  be  read 
with  the  eye  of  sympathy  rather  than  mocked  by  a  sense  of 
the  ridiculous.  Count  Neipperg,  dying  three  years  before 
1 ' Aiglon,  the  widow 's  grief  seemed  inconsolable,  although  two 
of  their  three  children  remained  to  comfort  her.  For  several 
years  the  Count's  place  at  the  head  of  the  ducal  government 
was  filled  by  a  temporary  selection.  When  it  becamiC  neces- 
sary for  Metternich  to  choose  a  permanent  successor,  his 
choice  fell  upon  Count  Bombelles,  whom  he  described  as  "a 
man  strong  enough  to  influence  the  weak  character  of  the 
Archduchess  Marie  Louise." 

Again  the  discrimination  of  the  great  statesman  was  abun- 
dantly verified.  For  Bombelles,  who  had  been  a  French  emi- 
grant in  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  daj^s,  and  was  now  a 
widower  of  forty-nine,  was  fairly  dragged  to  the  altar  by  the 
enamoured  Marie  Louise,  six  mouths  after  entering  her  service. 
The  Count  was  amazed  by  the  Duchess'  proposal  and  only 
obeyed  it  because  it  had  the  force  of  a  command  from  his 
sovereign. 

Since  it  is  not  possible  to  make  a  romance  of  Marie  Louise 's 
life,  it  were  well  not  to  dwell  upon  it  longer.  She  died  at 
Parma  in  her  fifty-seventh  year,  having  survived  the  first  of 
her  three  husbands  twenty-six  j-ears. 

The  story  of  Napoleon's  dynastic  ambition  fittingly  closes 
in  a  melancholy  dusk,  M'hich  wraps  with  its  gloom  the  couches 


484    IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

of  the  ill-fated  Hapsburgs.  From  a  long,  narrow,  bare  hall 
beside  the  Capuchin  church  in  the  midst  of  Vienna,  a  blue- 
eyed,  blond-bearded  monk  in  sandals  leads  the  waiting  pil- 
grim down  a  dark  cellar  stair  to  a  drear  vaulted  chamber 
where  Austria's  imperial  dead  for  300  years  lie  in  sim- 
ple bronze  coffins.  Many  of  them  are  scattered  about  the 
floor  as  if  but  pausing  on  their  way  to  the  grave.  Only  here 
and  there  a  monument  rises  dimly  in  the  twilight  specially  to 
mark  the  resting  place  of  some  emperor ;  but  the  most  con- 
spicuous tomb  of  all  is  that  of  the  woman  who  proved  herself 
more  of  a  man  than  any  of  her  race,  Maria  Theresa. 

Maximilian  is  there  among  his  kindred,  thanks  to  the  Aus- 
trian warship  which  lay  by  the  Mexican  shore,  helplessly 
waiting  to  bear  him  home  when  he  should  have  paid  the  pen- 
alty of  his  imperial  dream  at  Queretaro.  So,  too,  are  the 
Empress  Elizabeth,  the  guiltless  victim  of  an  assassin,  and 
her  son,  the  Crown  Prince  Kudolph,  enshrouded  in  the  tragic 
mystery  of  his  death. 

In  an  elevated  sarcophagus  sleeps  the  Emperor  Francis,  with 
four  metal  coffins  lying  on  the  floor  beside  him.  Those  compan- 
ions of  the  Emperor  are  not,  however,  the  four  wives,  who,  in 
succession,  shared  his  throne.  At  his  head  and  feet  lie  two 
children,  and  on  either  side  of  him  Marie  Louise  and  I'Aiglon, 
the  latter  booted  and  spurred,  and  in  his  Austrian  uniform. 

In  death  the  little  eagle's  paternity  was  not  disdained  or 
denied.  The  Hapsburgs  were  not  ashamed  to  confess  on  his 
coffin  plate  that  the  blood  of  Rudolph  and  the  Corsican 
mingled  in  his  veins,  and  the  inscription  boasts  that  he  was 
King  of  Rome  before  he  was  the  Duke  of  Reichstadt.  On 
Marie  Louise's  plate  Napoleon  alone  is  acknowledged  among 
her  husbands,  for  no  other  title  to  remembrance  had  she. 

It  was  not  there  among  the  Hapsburgs  but  among  the  Bour- 
bons that  the  Emperor  meant  his  Empress  and  his  heir  to 
find  their  sepulture.  Yet  even  at  St.  Denis  they  would  not 
be  in  prouder  or  more  ancient  company  than  beneath  the  old 
church  in  Vienna.  And  those  glory-loving  Frenchmen  who 
would  bring  I'Aiglon  back  to  place  him  beside  his  father  in 
the  Invalides  would  do  better  to  let  him  alone  in  his  captivity. 


CHAPTER  LIII 
ACROSS  A  CENTURY 

WHILE  the  body  of  Napoleon  lay  in  its  lonely,  un- 
marked orave  at  St.  Helena  his  spirit  conquered 
Europe  anew  and  mounted  again  the  throne  of 
France.  The  peoples  who  had  overthrown  his  Empire  soon 
found  to  their  sorrow  that  they  had  exchanged  a  brilliant  for 
a  stupid  despotism.  The  more  they  saw  of  the  little  heredi- 
tary tyrants  who  supplanted  him  the  more  they  lamented  the 
downfall  of  the  great  tyrant.  The  pledges  they  had  received 
from  their  monarchs  in  the  wars  of  liberation  were  ruthlessly 
broken  and  something  like  a  royalist  reign  of  terror  was  in- 
augurated by  the  Holy  Alliance.  That  federation,  that 
United  States  of  Europe,  imder  the  presidency  of  the  Em- 
peror of  Austria  and  with  Metternicli  for  its  premier,  really 
became  a  league  against  popular  rights  and  progress  every- 
where, and  the  armies  of  the  continent  were  converted  into 
an  international  police  force  for  the  suppression  of  liberty. 

In  his  will  Napoleon  had  said,  "It  is  my  wish  that  my 
ashes  may  repose  on  the  banks  of  the  Seine,  amid  the  French 
people  whom  I  loved  so  well."  That  the  body  of  the  exile 
might  be  rescued  from  alien  soil  and  rest  by  the  Seine  was  a 
growing  national  desire  among  the  French  when,  as  a  last 
resource,  the  Orleanist  King,  Louis  Philippe,  resolved  to  bring 
it  back  in  the  hope  that  his  fading  crown  might  borrow  some 
glory  from  the  imperial  dust.  And  England  having  gra- 
ciously consented  to  release  her  captive,  the  King  sent  his 
brother,  the  Prince  Joinville,  to  St.  Helena  to  escort  the  Em- 
peror home. 

In  the  Prince's  party  were  Generals  Bertrand  and  Gour- 
guad ;  Marchand,  the  valet ;  St.  Denis,  and  three  others  of  the 
old  servants  at  Longwood.  With  them  also  was  the  son  of  Las 
Cases,  who  was  now  to  revisit  in  manhood  the  sombre  scenes 

485 


i86  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

of  his  boyhood.  Still  another  member  of  the  pilgrimage  was 
the  son  of  Bertrand,  who  was  born  in  exile,  when  his  mother 
boasted  at  his  birth  that  she  had  received  one  visitor  without 
asking  permission  of  the  British  government. 

The  sight  of  their  prison  house  only  deepened  the  unpleasant 
memories  it  had  left  with  the  one-time  prisoners  of  St.  Helena. 
They  returned  to  Longwood  as  to  a  shrine  of  their  hero,  but 
they  found  that  it  had  reverted  to  its  original  use  and  again 
become  a  stable.  Horses,  cows,  and  pigs  had  been  turned  into 
the  Emperor's  study  and  bedroom  and  in  the  death  chamber 
a  farmer  winnowed  his  grain. 

The  grave  of  Napoleon,  however,  still  was  guarded  by  his 
zealous  captors,  as  if  determined  that  even  his  ghost  should  not 
escape  them.  When  the  visitors  made  their  pious  pilgrimage 
down  into  Geranium  Valley,  they  found  a  British  soldier 
posted  there  on  a  sentry  duty  that  never  had  been  omitted 
night  or  day  in  the  more  than  nineteen  years  that  the  captive 
had  slept  beneath  the  willows. 

Reverently  the  bare,  uninscribed  gravestones  were  removed 
and  the  coffin  was  lifted  out  of  the  brick  grave.  When  it  was 
opened,  they  who  had  thought  to  see  imperial  Caesar  dead 
and  turned  to  clay,  drew  back  in  astonishment  and  awe  at 
sight  of  the  Emperor,  with  his  Jove-like  brow,  lying  at  ease 
and  lifelike,  in  the  green  coat  of  the  chasseurs  of  the  Guard, 
the  cross  of  the  Legion  gleaming  on  his  breast  with  undimned 
lustre. 

On  a  December  day  in  1840,  Paris  opened  wide  her  gates  to 
receive  Napoleon,  as  if  he  were  the  still  living  conqueror  re- 
turned from  a  victorious  campaign.  Mounted  upon  a  stately 
funeral  car  and  escorted  by  the  aged  veterans  of  the  Old 
Guard,  his  body  was  borne  in  triumph  under  his  Arch  of  the 
Star  and  down  the  Champs  Elysees,  across  the  Place  de  la 
Concorde  and  over  the  Seine  to  the  Hotel  des  Invalides. 

Beneath  the  gilded  dome  of  the  Invalides,  the  King  and  the 
royal  family,  in  full  court  splendour,  awaited  the  arrival  of 
the  heroic  dead.  The  hush  was  broken  at  last  by  a  chamber- 
lain who  dramatically  entered  and  thrilled  the  distinguished 
assemblage  with  the  announcement,  "L'Empereur !" 


ACROSS  A  CENTURY  487 

Instantlj^  monarch  and  princes,  generals,  statesmen  and 
courtiers  rose  to  their  feet ;  but  one  among  them  feebly  sank 
into  his  chair  again  beneath  the  weight  of  his  nearly  ninety 
years.  This  was  Moncey,  governor  of  the  Invalides,  who  was 
the  last  marshal  of  the  Empire  to  give  up  the  defence  of  the 
capital  when  the  Allies  surged  against  its  walls  in  1814. 

And  now  when  no  drop  of  Bonaparte  blood  courses  beneath 
a  crown,  the  Emperor  still  is  enthroned  there  under  the  golden 
dome  of  the  Invalides.  That  vast  soldiers'  home  has  lost  the 
purpose  to  which  Louis  XIV  dedicated  it  when  he  opened  it 
to  the  wrecks  of  his  battles.  It  has  become  instead  a  great 
shrine  of  war,  whose  chief  deity  is  the  martial  Emperor  of  the 
French. 

The  magnificent  tomb  is  in  one  of  the  two  chapels  of  the 
immense  pile,  which  is  mainly  given  over  to  the  exhibition 
halls  of  a  museum,  crowded  with  the  jumbled  relics  of  ages 
of  warfare.  Always  the  visitors  to  the  museum  throng 
thickest  about  some  Napoleonic  souvenir :  the  rude  funeral  car 
which  bore  him  to  his  St.  Helena  grave,  a  gift  from  Queen 
Victoria;  a  simple  wooden  settee,  which  was  the  favourite 
seat  of  the  throneless  monarch  in  his  exile ;  the  walking  stick 
which  supported  him  who  once  had  carried  the  weight  of  em- 
pire on  his  shoulders;  the  rough,  frightfully  rough,  draft  of 
his  appeal  to  the  Prince  Regent  before  going  aboard  the 
BelleropJion,  and  other  of  his  undecipherable  scrawlings;  the 
writing  table  upon  which  he  poured  out  his  dreams  while  a 
hungry  lieutenant  at  Auxonne ;  his  camp  bed,  camp  desk  and 
camp  bookcase  and  the  whip  and  sword  and  gun  of  the  King 
of  Rome.  But  the  grey  overcoat,  the  green  undercoat,  the 
white  breeches  and  the  black  chapeau  of  the  conqueror  draw 
the  curious  closest  and  hold  them  longest. 

In  the  chapel  of  St.  Louis  a  silvery  bell  tinkles  the  half 
hours  among  the  tombs  in  the  Aisle  of  the  Brave,  where  the 
soldiers  of  France  sleep  in  a  timeless  eternity.  There  lie  Mar- 
shals Bessieres,  Moncey,  Serurier,  Oudinot  and  Jourdan. 
There  also  is  the  heart  of  Kleber,  which  the  unerring  knife 
of  an  Egyptian  assassin  found,  and  so,  too,  is  the  heart  of 
that  first  grenadier  of  France,  La  Tour  d'Auvergne. 


488  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

It  is  strange  that  of  Napoleon's  twenty-six  marshals  only 
three,  Lannes,  Bessieres,  and  Poniatowski,  should  have  met  a 
soldier's  death  and  that  all  but  eight  should  have  died  in  their 
beds.  Four  were  killed  in  the  period  of  their  master's  down- 
fall, Ney  by  the  Bourbons,  Murat  by  the  Neapolitans,  Brune 
by  a  mob  and  Berthier  by  falling  from  his  window,  while 
Mortier  was  struck  down  by  a  bomb  thrown  at  King  Louis 
Philippe  in  1835. 

Massena,  Augureau,  Perignon,  Kellerman  and  Lefebre  did 
not  long  survive  the  Empire,  and  died  before  Napoleon.  But 
thirteen,  or  precisely  one-half  of  the  marshals  outlived  the 
Emperor,  and  Grouchy,  Victor,  Oudinot,  Marmont,  Soult, 
Moncey  and  Bernadotte  were  still  living  when  his  remains 
were  brought  back  from  St,  Helena. 

The  Chapel  of  the  Dome,  in  which  Napoleon  lies,  was  erected 
by  the  Grand  Monarque  as  the  Royal  Church  in  the  Invalides, 
150  years  before  the  usurper  of  the  Bourbon  throne  found 
his  grave  in  front  of  its  high  altar.  It  was  the  Em- 
peror himself  who  converted  it  to  a  mortuary  purpose, 
when  he  brought  to  the  chapel  the  body  of  Turenne  and  the 
heart  of  Vauban,  those  two  marshals  of  Louis  XIV,  and  gave 
them  sepulture  there. 

The  lofty  wooden  dome,  with  its  now  neglected  and  shabby 
gilding,  rests  like  a  gigantic  helmet  on  the  tomb  of  Napoleon, 
which  sits  beneath  the  very  cupola  and  in  an  open  circular 
crypt,  twenty  feet  below  the  floor  of  the  church.  As  if  to 
armour  him  against  invaders  of  his  quiet  realm,  he  lies  in  no 
less  than  six  coffins  of  oak,  mahogany,  ebony,  lead,  and  tin, 
which  in  turn  are  guarded  within  a  massive  fortress  in  the 
form  of  an  imposing  sarcophagus,  standing  nearly  fifteen  feet 
high. 

The  rare  red  porphyry  of  the  sarcophagus  came  from  that 
Finland,  which,  at  Tilsit,  Napoleon  permitted  Eussia  to  take 
from  Sweden.  The  Czar  Nicholas  I  cheerfully  consented  to 
the  quarrying  of  it  with  the  remark  that  since  Russia  had 
overthrown  him,  it  was  only  fair  that  she  should  entomb  him. 
But  the  son  of  the  blue  sea  is  shielded  from  those  alien  stones 
cut  on  the  frozen  shores  of  the  White  Sea,  by  a  lining  of  the 


^^^^''-'''     wf^-'JBSr/^^Kf^^^^^^^^  .^^^^m^^^P^^ 

^^F^^S^'' 

^^PP^ 

1^ 


ACROSS  A  CENTURY  489 

warm-tinted  granite  of  his  own  native  Corsica,  while  the  base 
of  all  is  a  block  of  that  green  granite  with  which  nature  has 
fortified  the  Gaul  against  the  Teuton  in  the  mountains  of 
Vosges. 

Like  sentinels  about  the  tomb  stand  twelve  colossal  Vic- 
tories in  Carrara  marble.  Even  as  the  Empire  made  the  fatal 
mistake  of  exalting  force  above  justice,  so  Napoleon's  vic- 
tories of  peace  are  celebrated  in  the  dim  shadows  behind  his 
victories  of  war,  where  in  bas  relief  on  the  wall  of  the  crypt 
are  carved  symbolical  representations  of  his  undisputed  titles 
to  the  gratitude  of  posterity — the  Code  Napoleon ;  the  execu- 
tion of  great  public  works ;  the  founding  of  the  University  of 
France;  the  establishment  of  the  Legion  of  Honour;  the  pro- 
tection of  commerce  and  industry ;  the  regulation  of  the  public 
finances;  the  Concordat;  the  creation  of  the  council  of  state; 
the  reform  of  the  civil  administration  and  the  restoration  of 
public  order. 

Only  four  personages  of  the  Empire  were  specially  chosen 
to  be  their  Emperor's  attendants  in  death.  His  brothers, 
Joseph  and  Jerome,  have  their  tombs  in  chapels  on  either 
side  of  the  entrance  to  the  church,  while  downstairs  on  either 
side  of  the  bronze  doors  of  the  crypt  the  bodies  of  two  of  his 
most  devoted  followers  are  entombed  in  the  walls.  One  of 
these  is  Bertrand,  who  followed  him  in  his  two  exiles  and  to 
his  two  graves.  The  other  is  Duroc,  who  followed  him  in 
peace  and  war  until  he  fell  by  his  side  in  the  Saxon  campaign 
of  1813,  when  the  Emperor  in  his  bitter  contempt  for  the  in- 
gratitude of  man,  praised  his  fallen  servitor  for  having  the 
faithfulness  and  affection  of  a  dog.  Like  a  dog,  then  let  it 
be,  the  grand  marshal  of  the  palace  still  keeps  watch  at  the 
door  while  the.  master  rests  in  untroubled  sleep. 

Nothing  in  the  Invalides  better  emphasises  its  monumental 
grandeur  than  three  slabs  of  stone  in  one  of  the  small  rooms 
off  the  church.  They  are  the  uncarved  covering  of  the  un- 
marked grave  beneath  the  willows  at  St.  Helena.  Yet  this 
grave  at  the  Invalides,  too,  has  been  left  nameless.  After  all, 
whether  with  sword  or  pen,  with  axe  or  scythe,  a  man  cuts  his 
own  epitaph. 


490     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

Following  Sedan  there  was  a  violent  reaction  from  the  Na- 
poleonic idolatry  of  the  Second  Empire.  Scepticism  and  con- 
demnation swiftly  ran  to  an  extreme  as  great  as  the  blind 
credulity  of  the  idol  worshippers.  The  Napoleonic  legend  was 
furiously  torn  to  tatters  and  its  central  figure  was  transformed 
from  a  mythological  deity  into  the  scapegoat  of  modern  times ; 
from  an  impossible  demigod  he  was  distorted  into  an  impos- 
sible demon. 

Time  has  checked  that  reaction  and  softened  the  rage  of  the 
iconoclasts,  who  no  sooner  overcame  the  base  habit  of  looking 
up  to  Napoleon  than  they  fell  into  the  opposite  baseness  of 
flattering  themselves  by  looking  down  on  him.  It  is  difficult 
to  take  a  horizontal  view  of  one  whose  life  and  character 
touched  heights  so  lofty  and  sounded  depths  so  abysmal.  As 
the  world  increases  in  understanding,  men  will  be  enabled  to 
look  a  Napoleon  in  the  eye  and  view  him  on  a  level  with  them- 
selves, when,  perhaps,  he  will  lose  their  awe  but  gain  their 
charity.  As  history  grows  democratic,  it  will  become  more 
and  more  like  nature  herself,  careless  of  the  single  life  and 
careful  of  the  type.  We  are  now  too  prone  to  magnify  a  man 
and  to  minify  mankind,  to  forget  that  no  one  stands — or  falls 
— alone,  and  that  not  merely  some  men  but  that  all  men  are 
creatures  of  circumstances. 

We  have  seen  Napoleon  at  twenty-four,  a  drifting,  unam- 
bitious man,  apparently  of  the  common  mould ;  mediocre  in 
school ;  an  indiflierent  soldier ;  unkempt  and  awkward  in  the 
salon,  emitting  not  a  flash  of  that  genius  which  he  was  so  soon 
and  suddenly  to  radiate  before  a  dazzled  world.  We  have  seen 
him  unstirred  by  the  Great  Revolution,  when  it  had  been  rag- 
ing about  his  head  for  a  half  dozen  years;  and  deaf  to  the 
loud  knockings  of  opportunity,  which  had  aroused  so  many 
of  his  comrades.  We  have  seen  him  shunning  military  serv- 
ice, running  away  from  France  and  trying  all  the  while  to 
stay  in  his  native  island.  We  have  seen  him  aimlessly  loiter- 
ing in  the  streets  of  Paris,  where,  like  a  juror  at  a  coroner's 
inquest,  he  was  suddenly  called  out  of  the  crowd. 

Surely  500,  maybe  1000,  army  officers  had  more  experience 
and  reputation  than  he  when  he  was  placed  on  horseback.     He 


ACROSS  A  CENTURY  491 

was  nobody,  not  even  a  Frenchman;  but  authority  and  law, 
rank,  wealth,  and  seniority  had  all  been  swept  away  in  the 
Revolution  and  the  whole  structure  of  society  was  turned  up- 
side down.  The  slate  had  been  wiped  clean  when  the  mighty 
social  forces,  clamouring  for  an  agent,  seized  on  this  chance 
passer-by  and  flooded  him  with  their  overwhelming  energy. 
"Thousands  of  ages  will  elapse  before  the  circumstances  ac- 
cumulated in  my  case  draw  forth  another  from  among  the 
crowd  to  reproduce  the  same  spectacle,"  Napoleon  himself 
said,  at  St.  Helena. 

"The  moment  the  boy  put  on  a  general's  hat,  he  seemed  to 
have  grown  two  feet,"  said  Massena.  The  shiftless,  dawdling 
Corsican  flew  above  the  Alps.  He  leaped  the  Mediterranean. 
He  dashed  across  the  desert.  He  threw  himself  against  the 
gate  of  the  Orient,  and  its  hinges,  rusted  by  500  years  of  dis- 
use, were  shattered.  He  smote  slothful  Europe,  and  its 
medieval  systems  crumbled  to  dust. 

He  infused  armies,  lawyers,  artists,  builders  with  the  elec- 
tric force  of  the  Revolution,  and  at  his  command,  codes  were 
formulated,  arches  and  bridges  were  built,  roads  were  made 
and  canals  were  dug. 

His  young  head  grew  dizzy  as  he  tread  the  peaks  of  great- 
ness. "I  saw  the  world  spinning  beneath  me,  as  if  I  were 
being  carried  through  the  air. ' '  The  ruler  of  Italy  at  twenty- 
six;  the  despot  of  Egypt  at  twenty-eight;  the  dictator  of 
France  at  thirty;  the  master  of  Europe  at  thirty-two,  his 
youth  was  a  grievous  misfortune.  The  constitution  of  the 
United  States  bars  men  even  from  the  senate  until  they  are 
thirty,  and  from  the  presidency  until  they  are  thirty-five. 
Ceesar  was  forty  when  he  really  began  his  career.  This  man 
had  run  his  course  before  most  rulers  gain  supreme  power. 

The  politicians  of  Europe,  naturally  enough,  thought  his 
power  came  from  himself.  "The  world  invited  me  to  govern 
it.  Sovereigns  and  subjects  vied  with  one  another  in  hasten- 
ing beneath  my  sceptre." 

Inevitably  he  came  to  share  the  general  belief  that  he  \ras 
the  source  and  not  merely  the  medium  of  the  might  with 
which  he  was  invested.     He  thought  he  must  be  the  favourite 


492  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OP  NAPOLEON 

of  fortune.  He  was  the  child  of  destiny.  A  lucky  star  must 
have  shone  at  his  birth.  Assuming  that  he  must  have  been 
born  to  rule,  he  crowned  himself.  Believing  that  his  omnip- 
otence must  be  in  his  blood,  he  crowned  his  brothers  and  sis- 
ters, and  divorced  his  wife  that  he  might  surely  transmit  the 
divine  spark. 

He  found  himself  the  superman,  set  above  and  apart  from 
his  kind,  and  condemned  to  solitary  imprisonment  in  a  splen- 
did but  pitiable  isolation.  His  fanatical  egotheism,  his  self- 
worship  repelled  his  wives,  his  brothers,  his  sisters,  his  asso- 
ciates, whom  he  loaded  with  coronets  and  domains  without 
making  a  friend  among  them  all.  Awe,  dread  and  envy  cut 
him  off  from  the  affections  of  men  and  women  and  left 
him  filled  with  the  bitterness  of  Byron 's  cynical  lines : 

He  who  surpasses  or  subdues  mankind 
Must  look  down  on  the  hate  of  those  below. 

He  despised  men  and  challenged  the  impossible.  "I  may 
find  the  pillars  of  Hercules  in  Spain,"  he  boasted,  "but  I 
shall  not  find  the  limits  of  my  power." 

But  he  had  struck  down  the  Eevolution,  silenced  the  people 
and  chained  the  forces  that  had  filled  him  with  the  strength  of 
a  Colossus.  He  was  still  borne  on,  it  is  true,  but  only  by  the 
original  momentum.  "Where  once  he  had  won  campaigns  with 
50,000  and  60,000  republicans,  he  now  led  600,000  imperialists 
to  disaster.  At  last  no  military  genius  was  required  to  over- 
throw him,  either  at  Leipsic  or  at  the  gates  of  Paris.  Wel- 
lington only  stood  still  at  Waterloo  while  the  greatest  soldier 
of  the  age  spent  himself. 

Nevertheless,  France  brought  him  back  from  the  grave  after 
a  quarter  of  a  century  and  stirred  his  ashes  in  the  vain  hope 
that  she  might  find  a  live  cinder  wherewith  to  kindle  her 
glory  anew.  She  transfused  his  living  blood  from  the  veins 
of  Napoleon  III  into  the  anaemic  body  politic,  but  only  to  col- 
lapse at  Sedan.  Then  at  last  she  turned  from  the  tomb,  to 
discover  in  the  red  blood  of  her  people  the  true  source  of  her 
power,  as  it  had  been  of  Napoleon's. 

But  the  exile  has  his  wish.     His  ashes  repose  on  the  banks 


ACROSS  A  CENTURY  493 

of  the  Seine,  where  the  earth-hungry  conqueror  who  felt  him- 
self pent  and  stifled  within  the  wide  boundaries  of  Europe 
rests  in  the  narrow  empire  of  the  grave — 6i/ixl3  feet. 

There,  facing  the  altar  of  the  King  of  Kings  and  of  that 
other  victor  of  Mt.  Tabor  whose  invincible  sword,  however, 
is  not  of  the  flesh  and  whose  everlasting  Kingdom  is  not  of 
this  world,  he  is  enthroned  with  the  vain,  almost  theatrical 
pomp  and  splendour  of  his  brief  imperial  days.  Five  after- 
noons a  week  he  holds  his  crowded  court,  with  all  the  races 
of  men  for  his  courtiers.  While  they  lean  and  muse  on  the 
marble  balustrade,  gazing  down  upon  his  majestic  tomb,  the 
slanting  rays  of  the  sun,  transmuted  into  pure  gold  by  the 
stained  glass  windows  of  the  Chapel  of  the  Dome,  light  up 
his  violet  red  throne  with  a  glory  not  of  war  nor  of  earth. 

Spite  of  all  efforts  to  banish  him  from  memory  and  con- 
sign him  to  an  eternal  exile,  this  man  who  was  picked  out  of 
the  street  to  embody  common  men,  to  be  anointed,  crowned, 
sceptred,  empurpled  and  enthroned  above  the  monarchs  of 
long  descent;  this  son  of  the  people  who  made  a  mockery  of 
the  divinity  of  kings  and  the  sacredness  of  ancient  systems 
and  customs,  never  has  lost  his  dominion  over  the  imagina- 
tion of  men.  His  latest  bibliography,  compiled  by  a  German, 
contains  the  titles  of  no  less  than  80,000  books  that  have  been 
printed  about  him.  In  the  catalogue  of  the  British  IMuseum, 
he  distances  every  other  man  of  action,  only  Jesus  and  Shakes- 
peare receiving  more  space  on  the  shelves  of  that  great  library. 
He  remains  supreme  in  the  admiration  and  the  disappoint- 
ment, in  the  applause  and  the  reproach  of  men : 

The  glory,  jest  and  riddle  of  the  world. 

Had  he  not  lost  his  touch  with  the  people  he  would  rule  the 
globe  from  his  grave.  Had  he  kept  his  face  to  the  future  and 
not  turned  it  to  the  past,  the  earth  would  be  his  empire  and 
the  human  race  his  subjects.  Had  he  only  seen  and  welcomed 
the  dawning  of  this  age  of  democracy,  he  would  be  its  prophet, 
and  the  Invalides  would  be  more  than  a  brilliant  spectacle; 
it  would  be  the  shrine  of  mankind. 


CHRONOLOGY  OF  NAPOLEON 

1769 
August  15,  Napoleon  Bonaparte  bom  at  Ajaceio. 

1778 
December  15,  went  to  France. 

1779 
March  15,  entered  school  at  Brienne. 

1784 
October  31,  entered  Eeole  Militaire  at  Paris. 

1785 
September   28,   graduated — October   30,   joined   his    regiment   at 
Valence. 

1788 
June  15,  joined  his  regiment  at  Auxonne. 

1791 
June  1,  promoted  to  fii'st  lieutenant  and  returned  to  Valence. 

1792 
February  6,  dropped  from  the  French  army — Mai'ch  31,  elected 
lieutenant-colonel  Corsican  national  guard — July  10,  restored  to  the 
French  army — August  30,  appointed  captain. 

1793 
June  10,  banished  from  Corsica — October  18,  chief  of  battalion  at 
siege  of  Toulon — December  19,  fall  of  Toulon — December  22,  Napo- 
leon brigadier  general  of  artillery. 

1794 
August  12,  an'ested — August  20,  released. 

1795 
March  11,  sailed  on  Corsican  expedition — May  2,  ordered  to  Army 
of  the  West — September  15,  ordered  to  Turkey;  dropped  from  list 
of  generals — October  5,  suppressed  revolt  in  streets  of  Paris — Octo- 
ber 16,  general-in-chief  of  the  Army  of  the  Interior. 

495 


496  IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

1796 
March  2,  general-in-ehief  of  the  Army  of  Italy — March  9,  married 
Josephine  Beauhamais — April  9,  joined  army  at  Savona — April  12, 
defeated  Austrians  at  Monteuotte — April  13,  defeated  Sardinians  at 
JVIillesimo — Aj^ril  14,  separated  Sardinians  and  Austrians — April  15, 
defeated  Austrians  at  Dego — April  22,  defeated  Sardinians  at  Mon- 
dovi — April  28,  made  peace  with  Sardinia — May  10,  won  Battle  of 
Lodi — July,  founded  Cisalpine  and  Transpadane  republics — August 
3,  won  Battle  of  Lonato — AugTist  5,  Castiglione — September  5,  Ro- 
verado — September  8,  Bassano — November  12,  defeated  at  Caldiero 
— November  15,  16,  17,  won  Battle  of  Arcole. 

1797 
January  14,  won  Battle  of  Rivoli — January  16,  La  Favorita — Feb- 
ruaiy  3,  captured  Mantua — March  24,  won  Battle  of  Tarvis — March 

29,  captured  Klag:enfurt — April  18,  arranged  armistice  with  Austria 
at  Leoben — May,  founded  Ligurian  and  Venetian  republics — Octo- 
ber, united  Transpadane  with  Cisalpine  republic — October  17,  made 
Peace  of  Campo  Formio — December  5,  returned  to  Paris. 

1798 
May  19,  sailed  for  Egypt — June  11,  captured  Malta — July  2,  cap- 
tured Alexandria — July  21,  won  Battle  of  the  Pyramids — August  1, 
lost  his  fleet  at  Battle  of  the  Nile — September  11,  Turkey  declared 
war  against  him — October  21,  Cairo  revolted  against  him. 

1799 

February  10,  began  his  Syrian  campaign — March  7,  captured  Jaffa 
— March  17,  began  siege  of  Acre — April  16,  won  Battle  of  Mt.  Tabor 
— May  17,  retreated  from  Acre — June  14,  returned  to  Cairo — July 
25,  won  Battle  of  Aboukir — August  23,  took  flight  for  France — Oc- 
tober 9,  landed  in  France — November  10,  at  the  head  of  a  pro- 
visional government  in  France — December  25,  First  Consul  for  ten 
years. 

1800 

January,  reorganised  the  judiciaiy  and  the  government,  reformed 
tax  system  and  established  Bank  of  France — May  14,  began  his 
march  over  the  Alps — June  14,  won  Battle  of  Marengo — September 

30,  made  a  treaty  with  the  United  States — October  1,  secretly  pur- 
chased Louisiana  from  Spain — December  22,  Moreau  defeated  Aus- 
trians at  Hohenlinden — December  24,  Napoleon  escaped  infernal 
machine. 


CHRONOLOGY  OF  NAPOLEON       497 

1801 

February  9,  made  peace  with  Austria  at  Luneville — June  27,  the 
French  surrendered  Cairo — July  15,  Napoleon  concluded  the  Con- 
cordat— October  1,  sent  expedition  to  conquer  Santo  Domingo. 

1802 

March  27,  made  peace  with  England  at  Amiens — August  1,  First 
Consul  for  life. 

1803 

March  5,  decreed  the  Code  Napoleon — May  21,  ratified  sale  of 
Louisiana  to  the  United  States  the  day  war  with  England  began — 
June  29,  pitched  his  camp  at  Boulogne — ^August  23,  royalist  assassins 
landed  in  France. 

1804 

March  24,  Duke  d'Enghien  shot — March  25,  electoral  colleges  in- 
vited Napoleon  to  found  a  dynasty — May  18,  the  senate  proclaimed 
him  Emperor  of  the  French — November  30,  religious  marriage  to 
Josephine — December  2,  crowned. 

1805 

May  26,  crowned  King  of  Italy — August  29,  broke  camp  at  Bou- 
logne and  abandoned  invasion  of  England — September  25,  Grand 
Army  crossed  the  Rhine — October  20,  captui'ed  Ulm — October  21, 
Battle  of  Trafalgar — November  13,  Napoleon  entered  Vienna — De- 
cember 2,  won  Battle  of  Austerlitz — December  26,  Peace  of  Press- 
burg;  Napoleon  promoted  the  Elector  of  Bavaria  to  be  King. 

1806 

January  1,  promoted  the  Elector  of  Wiirtemberg  to  be  King — 
February  18,  made  Josejoh  Bonaparte,  King  of  Naples — June  6, 
Louis  Bonaparte,  King  of  Holland — July  12,  formed  the  Confed- 
eration of  the  Rhine — October  14,  overwhelmed  Prussians  and  Sax- 
ons at  Jena  and  Auerstadt — October  28,  entered  Berlin — November 
21,  issued  Berlin  Decree — December  11,  promoted  the  Elector  of 
Saxony  to  be  King. 

1807 

February  7-8,  Battle  of  Eylau — May  4,  death  of  Napoleon's  fa- 
vourite nephew  and  probable  heir — June  14,  Napoleon  won  Battle  of 
Friedland — July  7-9,  Peace  of  Tilsit — November  IS,  Napoleon  made 
Jerome  Bonaparte,  King  of  Westphalia — December  17,  issued  Milan 
Decree. 

1808 

May  2,  Spanish  Revolution  began — June  6,  Napoleon  made  Jo- 


498     IN  THE  FOOTSTEPS  OF  NAPOLEON 

seph  Bonaparte,  Kiug  of  Spain — July  19,  French  army  in  Spain 
surrendered  at  Baylen — July  21,  French  army  in  Portugal  defeated 
by  Wellesley — July  28,  King  Joseph  fled  from  Madrid — August  1, 
Napoleon  made  Murat,  King  of  Naples — September  27,  met  the 
Czar  at  Erfurt — December  4,  entered  Madrid. 

1809 
April  13,  opened  campaign  against  Austria — May  12,  entered  Vi- 
enna— May  17,  annexed  Rome — May  20-21,  defeated  at  Aspern-Ess- 
ling — July  6,  arrested  Pope  Pius  VII — July  6-7,  won  Battle  of 
Wagram — October  14,  made  treaty  of  peace  with  Austria — December 
15,  divorced  Josephine. 

1810 
March  11,  married  Marie  Louise  by  proxy — July  1,  King  Louis 
fled  from  Holland. 

1811 

March  20,  bii-th  of  the  King  of  Rome. 

1812 

June  24,  Napoleon  entered  Russia — June  28-July  16,  at  Vilna — 
July  26-August  13,  at  Vitebsk — August  16-24,  at  Smolensk — Sep- 
tember 7,  Battle  of  Borodino — September  15,  Napoleon  entered 
Moscow — September  15-18,  Moscow  burning — October  19,  Napoleon 
began  his  retreat — October  27,  the  first  frost — October  30,  bread  and 
beef  exhausted — November  4,  first  snow — November  17,  Napoleon 
won  Battle  of  Krasnoi — November  27,  crossed  the  Beresina — De- 
cember 6,  left  the  army — December  18,  arrived  in  Paris. 

1813 

April  15,  left  Paris  for  the  German  campaign — May  2,  won  Bat- 
tle of  Liitzen— May  20-21,  won  Battle  of  Bautzen— June  21,  King 
Joseph  fled  from  Spain — August  26-27,  Napoleon  won  Battle  of 
Dresden — October  16-18,  overthrown  at  Leipsie — November  9,  re- 
turned to  Paris. 

1814 

January  21,  released  Pope  Pius  VII — January  26,  left  for  cam- 
paign in,  France — Januaiy  29,  won  Battle  of  Brienne — February  1, 
lost  Battle  of  La  Rothiere — Februaiy  10,  won  Battle  of  Champau- 
bert — Febi-uaiy  11,  won  Battle  of  Montmirail — February  14,  won 
Battle  of  Chateau  Thierry — February  18,  won  Battle  of  Montereau 
— March  7,  fought  Battle  of  Craone — March  20,  narrowly  escaped  at 
Arcis  sur  Aube — March  29,  Marie  Louise  and  King  of  Rome  fled 


CHRONOLOGY  OF  NAPOLEON       499 

from  Paris — March  30,  fall  of  Paris — March  31,  Napoleon  at  Fon- 
tainebleau — April  6,  abdicated — April  11,  attempted  to  commit  sui- 
cide— April  20,  started  for  Elba — May  29,  death  of  Josephine. 

1815 
February  26,  Napoleon  sailed  from  Elba — March  1,  landed  in 
France — March  20,  entered  Paris — June  14,  began  the  Belgian  cam- 
paign— June  16,  won  Battle  of  Ligiiy — June  18,  overthrown  at 
Waterloo — June  21,  returned  to  Paris — June  22,  abdicated — July 
15,  went  aboard  the  British  warsliip,  Bellerophon — August  9,  sailed 
on  the  Northumberland  for  St.  Helena — October  16,  landed  on  St. 
Helena — December  10,  took  up  his  residence  at  Longwood. 

1816 
April  14,   Sir  Hudson  Lowe  arrived  at  St.  Helena — August  18, 
his  last  interview  with  Napoleon. 

1818 
September  28,  British  government  ordered  Napoleon  to  show  him- 
self to  an  officer  twice  a  day. 

1821 
May  5,  death  of  Napoleon. 

1832 
July  22,  death  of  the  King  of  Rome. 

1840 
December  15,  the  body  of  Napoleon  placed  in  the  Hotel  des  In- 
valides  in  Paris. 


THE  BONAPARTES 

Carlo  Maria  Bonaparte,  b.  1746,  d.  1785;  married  Letizia  Ramo- 
lino,  b.  1750,  d.  1836.     Eight  of  their  children  lived  to  maturity. 

I  Joseph,  King  of  Naples  and  Spain,  b.  1768,  d.  1844;  married 
Julie  Clary  and  had  two  daughters;  one  married  a  son  of  Louis 
Bonaparte  but  left  no  children,  and  the  other  married  Prince  Charles 
Bonaparte,  a  son  of  Lucien;  one  of  their  sons  became  Cardinal 
BonajDarte  and  one  of  their  gi'andehildren  the  wife  of  the  Prince 
of  the  Moskva,  great  grandson  of  Marshal  Ney. 

II  Napoleon,  Emperor  of  the  French,  King  of  Italy,  b.  1769,  d. 
1821;  married  Josephine  Tascher  de  la  Pagerie  Beauharnais;  di- 
vorced ;  maiTied  Archduchess  Marie  Louise  of  Austria ;  their  only 
son,  the  King  of  Rome,  died  without  children. 

III  Lucien,  Prince  of  Canino,  b.  1775,  d.  1840;  mamed  Chris- 
tine Boyer;  deceased;  married  Alexandrine  Jouberthin;  four  sons 
and  three  daughters ;  one  son  married  a  daughter  of  Joseph,  as  al- 
ready noted ;  two  other  sons  died  without  children ;  the  fourth  son 
became  the  father  of  Prince  Roland  Bonaparte  who  married  the 
daughter  of  M.  Blanc  of  Monte  Carlo,  and  their  daughter  is  the 
Princess  Marie,  wife  of  Prince  George  of  Greece. 

IV  Elisa,  Grand  Duchess  of  Tuscany,  b.  1777,  d.  1820;  married 
Felix  Bacchiochi;  one  son  and  one  daughter. 

V  Louis,  King  of  Holland,  b.  1778,  d.  1846;  married  Hortense, 
daughter  of  the  Empress  Josephine;  three  sons,  the  third  of  whom 
ascended  his  uncle's  throne  as  Napoleon  III. 

VI  Pauline,  Princess  of  Guastalla,  b.  1780,  d.  1825;  married 
General  Leelerc;  deceased;  married  Prince  Borghese  of  Rome,  but 
left  no  children. 

VII  Caroline,  Queen  of  Naples,  b.  1782,  d.  1839 ;  married  Murat, 
King  of  Naples;  two  sons. 

VIII  Jerome,  King  of  Westphalia,  b.  1784,  d.  1860;  mamed 
Elizabeth  Paterson  of  Baltimore ;  one  son ;  Charles  Joseph  Bona- 
parte, formerly  Attorney  General  of  the  United  States,  is  a  grand- 
son, and  Jerome  Napoleon  Bonaparte  of  Washington  a  great 
grandson;  the  American  marriage  having  been  declared  void  under 

^500 


CHRONOLOGY  OF  NAPOLEON       501 

the  French  law,  Jerome  married  Princess  Catherine  of  "WUrteraberg; 
two  sons  and  one  daughter;  one  of  the  sons,  Napoleon  Josej^h 
Charles,  "Plon  Plon,"  married  the  Duchess  Clothilda  of  Savoy, 
daughter  of  Victor  Emmanuel  II,  King  of  Italy,  and  their  elder 
son,  Victor  Napoleon  who  married  Princess  Clementine  of  Belgium, 
is  the  head  of  the  house  of  Bonaparte  and  pretender  to  the  thi-one ; 
the  second  son.  Napoleon  Louis,  formerly  was  a  general  in  the  Rus- 
sian army,  and  a  sister  of  these  two,  the  Princess  Letizia,  is  the 
widow  of  Amadeo,  Duke  of  Aosta,  who  in  1872  was  elected  King  of 
Spain  but  who  abdicated  the  throne. 


PS3NTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF  AMERICA 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Aboukir,  Egypt,  Battle  of,  108, 
109. 

Acre,  Syria,  Siege  of,  97-106. 

Adams,  John  Quincy,  on  the  cause 
of  the  Russian  war,  320. 

Alexander  I  of  Russia,  ordered 
mourning  for  the  Duke  d'En- 
ghien,  166;  mistook  Napoleon's 
appeals  for  confession  of  weak- 
ness, 194;  eager  to  see  a  battle, 
195;  at  the  Battle  of  Austerlitz, 
199-201 ;  his  flight  after  the  bat- 
tle, 204;  his  pledge  to  Frederick 
William  III  over  tomb  of  Fred- 
erick the  Great,  219;  with  King 
and  Queen  of  Prussia  at  Memel, 
236;  at  Tilsit,  240-245;  his  re- 
union with  Napoleon  at  Erfurt, 
269;  paltering  with  Napoleon 
over  marriage  proposal,  299 ;  his 
refusal  to  shut  out  American 
ships  and  estrangement  from 
Napoleon,  320,  321;  at  the  fron- 
tier when  Napoleon  invaded 
Russia,  331;  his  defiance,  36Q; 
his  medal  commemorating  the 
repulse  of  Napoleon,  349 ;  the 
leader  of  the  people's  revolt 
against  Napoleon,  361,  362;  re- 
treating at  Bautzen,  367 ;  at 
the  Battle  of  Leipsic,  379;  in 
the  campaign  of  1814,  385;  his 
insistence  on  making  a  drive  at 
Paris,  391;  entering  Paris,  395; 
his  visits  to  Josephine,  400,  401 ; 
his  inauguration  of  the  Holy 
Alliance,  473. 


505 


Alvinzi,  General,  repulsed  Napo- 
leon at  Caldiero,  56;  defeated 
by  Napoleon  at  Arcole,  57-59 ; 
at  Rivoli,  60,  61. 

Antommarchi,  Francesco,  Dr.,  phy- 
sician to  Napoleon  at  St.  He- 
lena, 469,  470;  rebuffed  by  Marie 
Louise,  477,  478. 

Arcole,  Italy,  Battle  of,  57-59. 

Aspern-Essling,  Austria,  Battle  of, 
275-277. 

Auerstadt,  Prussia,  Battle  of,  224. 

Augureau,  General,  at  Battle  of 
Eylau,  234 ;  his  death,  488. 

Augusta,  Princess  of  Bavaria,  be- 
trothed to  Eugene  Beauharnais 
by  Napoleon,  206. 

Austerlitz,  Austria,  Battle  of,  193- 
205. 

Austria,  her  campaign  against 
France  in  1796,  47;  returning  to 
attack  of  Napoleon  fifth  time, 
60 ;  brought  to  terms,  64 ;  ceded 
Belgium  to  France,  72;  received 
Venice  from  Napoleon,  72;  the 
Austrian  campaign  of  1800,  119; 
in  the  third  coalition,  185;  over- 
whelmed at  Ulm,  186-191;  con- 
quered at  Austerlitz  and  surren- 
dered last  foothold  in  Italy  and 
on  the  Adriatic,  204;  her  treaty 
with  Napoleon  in  1809,  280,  28 1'; 
seeking  matrimonial  alliance 
with  Napoleon,  299,  300;  rejoic- 
ing over  the  marriage  of  Marie 
Louise,  302;  permitted  violation 
of  treaty  pledges  to  Napoleon  at 


506 


INDEX 


his  abdication,  413,  414;  her 
commissioner  to  St.  Helena  re- 
buffed by  Napoleon,  466. 


Balmain,  Count,  Russian  commis- 
sioner at  St.  Helena,  466. 

Bathurst,  Lord,  his  untimely  fear 
of  Napoleon's  escape  from  St. 
Helena,   470. 

Bautzen,  Saxony,  Battle  of,  367. 

Bavaria,  raised  to  a  kingdom  by 
Napoleon,  213. 

Bavaria,  King  of,  with  Napoleon 
on  eve  of  Russian  campaign,  329. 

Beauharnais,  Alexandre  de,  mar- 
riage to  Josephine,  39,  40;  his 
death,  41. 

Beauharnais,  Eugene,  his  birth, 
40;  asking  Napoleon  for  his  fa- 
ther's sword,  42 ;  with  his  step- 
father at  Acre,  104;  his  mar- 
riage with  Augusta,  206;  Vice- 
roy of  Italy  and  heir  to  Italian 
crown,  216;  Napoleon's  instruc- 
tions to,  on  domestic  relations, 
283;  at  the  divorce  of  his 
mother,  296-297 ;  with  Napoleon 
on  eve  of  Russian  campaign, 
330;  his  presentiment  of  the 
Moscow  disaster,  338;  on  the 
retreat,  354-358. 

Beauharnais,  Fanny,  approved 
Josephine's  marriage  to  Napo- 
leon, 44. 

Beauharnais,  Hortense,  her  birth, 
40;  her  loveless  marriage  to 
Louis  Bonaparte,  157-158;  death 
of  her  eldest  son,  216,  217;  Na- 
poleon's tribute  to  her,  283;  at 
the  divorce  of  her  mother,  296; 
her  tomb,  401 ;  at  Napoleon's 
final  overthrow,  450;  her  part- 
ing gift  to  him,  451. 

Beauharnais,  Stephanie,  betrothed 
to  Prince  of  Baden  by  Napoleon, 


206;  the  spoiled  child  of  the 
Empire,  283. 

Beaulieu,  Marshal,  outwitted  by 
Napoleon,  48. 

Beethoven,  Ludwig  Van,  recalled  a 
dedication  to  Napoleon,  259. 

Belgium,  taken  from  Austria  by 
France,  72;  England  determined 
to  expel  Napoleon  from,  388. 

Bernadotte,  Marshal,  at  the  Battle 
of  Austerlitz,  200;  in  the  Jena 
campaign,  220;  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  at  Wagram,  278;  his 
selection  as  crown  prince  of 
Sweden,  323,  324;  in  arms 
against  Napoleon,  371. 

Berthier,  Marshal,  at  Battle  of 
Eylau,  234;  with  Napoleon  in 
Spain,  269;  with  Napoleon  in 
Austria,  273;  at  the  first  abdica- 
tion, 397;  his  death,  488. 

Bertrand,  General,  with  Napoleon 
at  Elba,  403;  joined  him  in  his 
St.  Helena  exile,  456;  his  at- 
tendance on  him  at  Longwood, 
462;  returned  to  St.  Helena  to 
escort  Napoleon's  body  to 
France,  485,  486;  his  tomb  at 
the  Invalides,  489. 

Bertrand,  Mme.,  attempted  suicide 
rather  than  go  to  St.  Helena, 
461 ;  by  Napoleon's  deathbed, 
471. 

Bessi&res,  Marshal,  his  ante- 
cedents, 247,  248;  in  the  Danube 
campaign,  276 ;  his  death,  367 ; 
his  tomb  in  the  Invalides,  487. 

Bliicher,  General,  recalled  to  the 
Prussian  army,  365,  366;  in 
the  campaign  of  1813,  373; 
in  the  campaign  of  1814,  385; 
at  the  Battle  of  Brienne,  386 ;  at 
the  Battle  of  La  Rothiere,  387; 
hurled  back  by  Napoleon,  389; 
repulsed  Napoleon,  390;  fooled 
in   the  Hundred  Days,  428;   his 


INDEX 


507 


army,  429;  at  the  Battle  of 
Ligny,  430,  431;  his  assurance 
to  Wellington  on  the  eve  of 
Waterloo,  433 ;  marching  to 
Waterloo,  439;  at  Waterloo, 
443-446;  wished  to  shoot  Napo- 
leon, 450. 

Bombelles,  Count,  third  husband 
of  Marie  Louise,  483. 

Bonaparte,  Betsy  Paterson,  her 
marriage  to  Jerome  Bonaparte, 
206-212;  son  born,  209;  her  de- 
scendants, 211;  political  effect 
of  the  Pope's  refusal  to  annul 
her  marriage,  322. 

Bonaparte,  Carlo,  wished  to  fol- 
low Paoli  to  England,  6 ;  entered 
Napoleon  at  school  in  Brienne, 
13;  his  character,  13,  14;  noble 
deputy  at  Versailles,  14;  his 
death,  20. 

Bonaparte,  Caroline,  left  behind  in 
flight  of  Bonapartes  from  Ajac- 
cio,  29;  her  marriage  with  Mu- 
rat,  157;  the  most  ambitious  of 
Napoleon's  sisters,  214,  215;  her 
death,  483. 

Bonaparte,  Charles  Joseph,  attor- 
ney-general of  the  United  States 
and  grandson  of  King  Jerome 
Bonaparte,  211. 

Bonaparte,  Elisa,  flight  from  Ajac- 
cio,  29 ;  her  passion  for  power, 
215;  her  death,  482. 

Bonaparte,  Jerome,  left  behind  in 
flight  of  Bonapartes  from  Ajac- 
cio,  29;  his  heirs  excluded  from 
imperial  succession,  168;  his 
marriage  with  Betsy  Paterson 
of  Baltimore,  206-212;  son  born, 
209 ;  his  marriage  with  Princess 
Catherine  of  Wlirtemberg,  209; 
King  of  Westphalia,  210;  his  ex- 
travagances, 214;  with  Napoleon 
in  the  invasion  of  Russia,  331 : 
his   kingdom   engulfed,   370;    at 


W^aterloo,  439;  his  tomb  at  the 
Invalides,  489. 

Bonaparte,  Jerome  Napoleon,  born 
to  Betsy  Paterson,  209 ;  ignored 
in  father's  will,  210;  declined 
dukedom  in  Second  Empire,  210; 
graduated  from  Harvard,  210; 
married  American  girl,  211;  left 
two   sons,   211. 

Bonaparte,  Colonel  Jerome  Napo- 
leon, son  of  Jerome  Napoleon 
Bonaparte  and  grandson  of 
King  Jerome  Bonaparte,  211. 

Bonaparte,  Jerome  Napoleon, 
great  grandson  of  King  Jerome, 
211. 

Bonaparte,  Joseph,  birthplace,  5; 
at  school  with  Napoleon  in 
France,  14;  accompanied  Jose- 
phine to  Italy,  54;  negotiated 
Treaty  of  Mortefontaine  with 
the  United  States,  143 ;  his  heirs 
in  line  of  imperial  succession, 
168;  a  prince  of  the  Empire, 
169;  made  King  of  Naples,  213; 
appointed  King  of  Spain,  266, 
267;  confronted  by  revolution, 
267-270;  his  flight  from  Spain, 
370;  chief  adviser  of  Marie 
Louise  as  regent,  385;  ofi'cred 
Napoleon  his  cabin  in  a  ship 
boimd  to  the  United  States,  452 ; 
his  tomb  at  the  Invalides,  489. 

Bonaparte,  Letizia,  in  the  Corsican 
revolution,  5 ;  described,  6 ;  op- 
posed liusband's  desire  to  follow 
Paoli  to  England,  6;  her  tomb 
described,  10 ;  her  visit  to  Na- 
poleon at  school,  15;  in  poverty, 
25;  fleeing  from  the  Paolists, 
29;  handsomely  remembered  by 
Napoleon  in  the  first  hour  of 
victory,  68;  the  trials  and  fears 
of  Mnie.  Mere  in  the  Empire, 
21.5,  216;  her  lack  of  affection, 
291;     with    Napoleon    at    Elba, 


508 


INDEX 


410;  the  only  one  in  the  secret 
of  the  projected  flight,  415;  her 
parting  call  before  Napoleon's 
surrender  to  England,  451;  her 
life  after  the  fall  of  the  Empire, 
482,  483;  her  death,  483. 

Bonaparte,  Louis,  educated  by  Na- 
poleon, 26;  flight  from  Ajaccio, 
29;  to  the  rescue  of  Napoleon  at 
Arcole,  58 ;  his  loveless  marriage 
with  Hortense  Beauharnais,  157, 
158;  his  heirs  in  line  of  imperial 
succession,  168;  a  prince  of  the 
Empire,  169;  made  King  of  Hol- 
land, 214;  death  of  his  eldest 
son,  216,  217;  his  flight  from  the 
throne,   323. 

Bonaparte,  Lucien,  President  of 
the  Five  Hundred,  113;  his  heirs 
excluded  from  imperial  succes- 
sion, 168;  rejected  crowns  in 
loyalty  to  his  wife,  214;  his 
death,  483. 

Bonaparte,  Pauline,  flight  from 
Ajaccio,  29;  created  Duchess, 
215;  only  sister  with  any  affec- 
tion for  Napoleon,  283;  with 
him  at  Elba,  410;  her  death, 
482. 

Bonaparte,  Victor,  receiving  pil- 
grims from  Ajaccio,  30;  pre- 
tender, 211. 

Borodino,  Russia,  Battle  of,  337, 
338. 

Bourrienne,  Louis  Antoine  Fauve- 
let  de.  Napoleon's  schoolmate  at 
Brienne,  17;  with  him  in  the 
Revolution,  27 ;  became  his  sec- 
retary, 69;  settling  Josephine's 
bills,  155,  156;  his  betrayal  of 
Napoleon  and  his  dismissal, 
162,  163;  conniving  at  the  resto- 
ration  of  the   Bourbons,   396. 

Brazil,  her  empire  founded  by 
Portuguese  royal  family  in  flight 
from  Napoleon,  266. 


Brienne,  France,  Battle  of,  386. 

Browning,  Robert,  his  poem  on 
Napoleon,  273. 

Brune,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248. 

Billow,  General,  in  the  campaign 
of  1814,  385;  at  Waterloo,  440, 
442,  444. 

Buonvita,  Father,  one  of  Napo- 
leon's priests  at  St.  Helena,  469. 

Caldiero,  Italy,  Battle  of,  56. 

Cambaceres,  Chancellor,  appointed 
arch  chancellor  of  the  Empire, 
169;  dread  of  Napoleon's  mar- 
riage with  Marie  Louise,  301. 

Cambronne,  General,  with  Napo- 
leon at  Elba,  403;  Napoleon's 
orders  to  him  on  return  from 
Elba,  417;  "The  Old  Guard  dies 
but  never  surrenders,"  445. 

Campbell,  Colonel,  warned  British 
government  that  Napoleon 
would  leave  Elba  unless  treaty 
were  fulfilled,  413;  fooled  by 
Napoleon,  415,  416. 

Campo  Formio,  Italy,  the  Peace  of, 
72. 

Carteaux,  General,  Napoleon's 
commander  at  Toulon,  32;  pen- 
sioned by  First  Consul,   148. 

Castiglione,  Italy,  Battle  of,  55. 

Catherine,  Princess  of  Wiirtem- 
berg,  married  to  Jerome  Bona- 
parte, 209;  Napoleon's  kindness 
to,  283. 

Caulaincourt,  Armand  de,  with  Na- 
poleon in  Spain,  269;  on  Napo- 
leon's forgiveness,  317;  on  the 
Russian  retreat,  357;  with  Na- 
poleon at  the  fall  of  Paris,  394, 
395. 

Champaubert,  France,  Battle  of, 
389. 

Charles,  Arch  Duke  of  Austria, 
his  retreat  before  Napoleon,  62- 


I 


INDEX 


509 


64;  his  retreat  in  1809,  273;  at 
Aspern-Essling  and  \Vagram, 
275-279;  proxy  of  Napoleon  at 
marriage  of  Marie  Louise,  304. 

Charles  X  of  France,  sent  to  repel 
Napoleon  on  his  return  from 
Elba,  421;  abandoned  his  com- 
mand, 423. 

Chateau  Thierry,  France,  Battle 
of,  389. 

Cockburn,  Admiral,  in  charge  of 
Napoleon  on  the  voyage  to  St. 
Helena,  457. 

Code  Napoleon,  140. 

Colombier,  Mile.,  Napoleon's  first 
sweetheart,  23;  remembered  by 
him  in  days  of  his  power,  282. 

Concordat,  The,  138-140. 

Consalvi,  Cardinal,  negotiated  the 
Concordat,   139. 

Constant,  married  by  Napoleon, 
286;  dressing  him  to  meet  Marie 
Louise,  306 ;  neglected  to  give 
him  waterproof  boots  at  Boro- 
dino, 337;  abandoned  his  fallen 
master  in  1814,  398. 

Davout,  Marshal,  in  the  school  at 
Brienne,  19;  at  Ulm,  190;  at  the 
Battle  of  Austerlitz,  201,  202; 
won  the  Battle  of  Auerstadt, 
224;  at  Battle  of  Eylau,  235; 
his  antecedents,  247,  248;  cut 
off  by  the  Danube,  276;  at  Wag- 
ram,  279;  on  the  Russian  re- 
treat, 354-358;  ordered  Napo- 
leon out  of  Paris  in  1815,  449. 

Demidoff;  Prince,  his  museum  in 
Elba,  408;  his  yearly  memorial 
service  for  Napoleon,  412. 

Demoulin,  Jean,  presented  $20,000 
to  Napoleon  on  return  from 
Elba,  422. 

Denmark,  Napoleon  and  Czar  de- 
termined to  close  her  ports 
against  England,  244 ;  renounced 


her  alliance  with  Napoleon  in 
1814;  ceded  Norway  to  Sweden 
and  Heligoland  to  England,  384. 

Desaix,  General,  saving  the  day  at 
Marengo,  129;   his  death,  130. 

Dresden,  Saxony,  Battle  of,  373- 
375;   the  field"  to-day,  374-376. 

Drouot,  General,  at  the  Battle  of 
Liitzen,  366;  with  Napoleon  at 
Elba,  403;  his  fatal  advice  at 
Waterloo,  434. 

Dupont,  General,  surrendered  Na- 
poleonic eagles  in  Spain  for  first 
time,  268. 

Duroc,  General,  appointed  grand 
marshal  of  the  palace,  169;  at 
Tilsit,  241 ;  returning  from 
Spain  with  Napoleon,  271;  on 
Napoleon's  absolutism,  316,  317; 
on  the  Russian  retreat,  357;  his 
death,  368;  Napoleon  thought 
of  taking  his  name  after  Water- 
loo, 453 ;  his  tomb  at  the  Inva- 
lides,  489. 

Enghien,  Due  d',  kidnapped  by 
Napoleon's  soldiers,  164;  shot, 
165. 

England,  war  with  France  in 
1793,  28;  her  forces  defeated  at 
Toulon,  33,  34;  the  one  uncon- 
quered  foe  of  France  in  1790, 
73;  subsidised  the  Austrian 
campaign  of  1800,  119;  made 
peace  with  Napoleon  in  1802, 
133;  reopened  war  with  France 
in  1803,  178-180;  "The  Great 
Terror"  at  time  of  Napoleon's 
threatened  invasion,  181;  in  the 
third  coalition,  185;  her  recog- 
nition of  equality  of  flags  at  sea 
demanded  by  Russia,  244;  her 
restrictions  on  neutral  com- 
merce, 264;  her  alliance  with 
Spanish  revolutionists,  270:  her 
wares    boycotted    by    Napoleon, 


510 


INDEX 


280;  her  struggle  against  con- 
tinental system,  321,  322;  most 
constant  foe,  370,  371;  received 
Heligoland  from  Denmark,  384; 
her  determination  to  expel  Na- 
poleon from  Holland  and  Bel- 
gium, 388 ;  permitted  violation 
of  treaty  pledges  to  Napoleon  at 
his  abdication,  413,  414;  warned 
by  Col.  Campbell,  her  commis- 
sioner in  Elba,  that  Napoleon 
would  leave  unless  treaty  were 
fulfilled,  413,  414;  her  contin- 
gent at  Waterloo,  438;  her  min- 
istry determined  to  take  revenge 
on  Napoleon,  455. 

Eugenie,  Ex-Empress,  owner  of 
Napoleon's  birthplace,   8. 

Eylau,  East  Prussia,  Battle  of, 
233-235. 

Egypt,  conquered  by  Napoleon, 
77-85;  conquered  by  England 
and  restored  to  Turkey,  179. 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  on  Napo- 
leon's army  at  Eylau,  235 ;  on 
Napoleon's  memoirs,  260. 

Ferdinand  VII,  of  Spain,  surren- 
dered to  Napoleon,  266;  liber- 
ated, 384. 

Fesch,  Joseph,  Cardinal,  his  tomb 
at  Ajaccio,  10;  taught  Napoleon 
the  alphabet,  14;  flight  from 
Ajaccio,  29;  performing  reli- 
gious marriage  of  Napoleon  and 
Josephine,  173;  married  Napo- 
leon and  Marie  Louise,  307;  his 
vain  appeal  to  Napoleon  for 
moderation,  326;  his  parting 
call  before  Napoleon's  surrender 
to  England,  451;  chose  phy- 
sicians and  priests  for  St.  He- 
lena, 469. 

Finland,  Napoleon  consented  to 
Russia  taking  it  from  Sweden, 
245. 


Flammarion,  Camille,  his  villa  on 
the  site  of  a  Napoleonic  inn, 
394. 

Fouche,  Joseph,  warning  Napoleon 
against  the  Bourbons,  161;  spy- 
ing on  the  First  Consul,  162; 
plotting  the  downfall  of  the  Re- 
public, 166;  his  sharp  retort  on 
the  Emperor,  169;  at  Napoleon's 
final  overthrow,  449,  450. 

France,  her  conquest  of  Corsica, 
5-6;  opening  of  the  Revolution, 
25 1  revolutionary  scenes  in 
Paris,  27,  28;  war  with  Eng- 
land in  1793,  28;  the  attempted 
revolution  of  Vendemiaire,  35- 
37 ;  her  campaign  against  Aus- 
tria in  1796,  47;  took  Belgium 
from  Austria,  72;  her  struggle 
to  conquer  England,  73,  74; 
opened  war  with  England  the 
day  Louisiana  treaty  was  rati- 
fied, 145;  conditions  under  the 
Consulate,  159,  160;  restored 
statue  of  Napoleon  to  Vendome 
column,  254;  her  war  weariness 
and  refusal  to  rally  to  Napoleon 
in  the  Hundred  Days,  426,  427; 
her  commissioner  to  St.  Helena 
rebuffed  by  Napoleon,  466;  the 
Revolution  of  1830  and  the  King 
of  Rome,  479;  found  at  last  her 
redemption  in  democracy,  492. 

Francis  I  of  Austria,  mistook  Na- 
poleon's appeals  for  peace  as 
confession  of  weakness,  194;  im- 
patient to  recapture  Vienna, 
195;  at  the  Battle  of  Austerlitz, 
199-201;  his  meeting  with  Na- 
poleon after  Austerlitz,  203;  at 
the  front  in  1809,  274;  his  peace 
treaty  with  Napoleon  in  1809, 
280,  281;  anxious  to  sacrifice 
his  daughter  to  Napoleon,  299; 
implored  by  her,  301 ;  with  Na- 
poleon  on  eve  of   Russian  cam- 


I 


INDEX 


511 


paign,  329;  in  the  campaign  of 
1813,  372,  373;  at  the  Battle  of 
Leipsic,  379;  in  the  campaign 
of  1814,  385;  commissioned 
Metternich  to  explain  to  King 
of  Rome  the  downfall  of  Napo- 
leon, 476 ;  his  tomb,  484. 

Frederick  William  III  of  Prussia, 
ordered  mourning  for  the  Duke 
d'Enghien,  166 ;  playing  fast  and 
loose  with  Napoleon,  218-220; 
his  pledge  to  the  Czar  over  the 
tomb  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
219;  his  retreat  from  Napoleon, 
227-237 ;  snubbed  at  Tilsit,  240 ; 
interrogated  by  Napoleon,  241; 
received  Napoleon's  ultimatum, 
244;  a  vassal  of  Napoleon,  245; 
with  him  on  eve  of  Russian  cam- 
paign, 329;  swept  away  on  a 
tide  of  patriotism  in  1813,  363; 
at  the  Battle  of  Leipsic,  379; 
in  the  campaign  of  1814,  385; 
entering  Paris,  395;  his  visit  to 
Josephine,  401. 

Friedland,  East  Prussia,  Battle  of, 
236,  237. 

Fulton,  Robert,  vainly  offered 
steamboat  and  torpedo  to  France 
and  England,  180. 

Garibaldi,  Giuseppe,  at  Elba,  405. 

George  IV  of  England,  Napoleon's 
appeal  to  him,  453. 

Georges,  Cadoudal,  leader  in  a 
Bourbon  plot  against  First  Con- 
sul, 163;  his  death,  164. 

Germany;  her  condition  at  opening 
of  19th  century,  218;  the  realisa- 
tion of  Queen  Louise's  vision, 
246;  the  rising  of  her  people 
against  Napoleon,  361-363. 

Gladstone,  William  E.,  on  Napo- 
leon as  an  administrator,  261. 

Gourgaud,  General,  joined  Napo- 
leon on  his  St.  Helena  exile,  456 ; 


his  attendance  at  Longwood, 
462;  returned  to  Europe,  468; 
suspected  of  a  mission  to  King 
of  Rome,  478;  returned  to  St. 
Helena  to  escort  Napoleon's 
body  to  France,  485,  486. 
Grouchy,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  sent  in  pursuit  of 
Bliicher,  431;  on  the  day  of 
Waterloo,   433,   439-441. 

Holland,  bestowed  upon  Louis  Bon- 
aparte by  Napoleon,  214;  an- 
nexed, 323;  England  determined 
to  expel  Napoleon  from,  388. 

Holland,  Lord,  a  defender  of  Na- 
poleon in  England,  464. 

Holy  Alliance,  inaugurated,  483; 
a  league  against  liberty,  485. 

Hugo,  Victor,  at  Elba,  405;  the 
original  of  his  character  of  Jean 
Valjean  followed  Napoleon  to 
Waterloo,  420. 

Ilari,  Camilla,  Napoleon's  foster 
mother,  6;  pensioned  by  First 
Consul,  148;  at  Napoleon's  cor- 
onation, 175. 

Italy,  her  war  of  liberation,  56; 
the  corner  stone  of  her  union 
laid  by  Napoleon,  69,  70;  Na- 
poleon cro^vned  King  of,   176. 

Jaflfa,  Palestine,  the  capture  of 
and  massacre  of  prisoners  in, 
94-96;  Napoleon  in  its  plague 
hospital,   107. 

Jefferson,  Thomas,  his  purchase  of 
Louisiana,  144-146;  troubled  by 
the  Bonaparte-Paterson  mar- 
riage, 207. 

Jena,  Saxe  Weimar,  Battle  of, 
221-224. 

Jews,  The,  emancipated  by  Napo- 
leon, 259. 


512 


INDEX 


Joinville,  Prince,  brought  Napo- 
leon's body  from  St.  Helena, 
485. 

Jomini,  General,  abandoned  Napo- 
leon in  1813,  372. 

Josephine,  Empress,  her  girlhood 
in  Martinique,  38-40;  her  voy- 
age to  France  and  marriage  to 
Alexandre  de  Beauharnais,  39, 
40;  return  to  Martinique,  40; 
in  the  shadow  of  the  guillotine, 
41;  death  of  her  husband,  41; 
her  meeting  with  Napoleon,  42 ; 
her  lawyer's  protest  against  her 
marriage,  44;  the  marriage,  44, 
45 ;  amused  by  her  bridegroom's 
ardour,  49;  joins  him  in  Italy, 
53,  54 ;  chiding  letters  from  him, 
59;  her  life  at  Malmaison  and 
her  social  leadership,  149-155; 
her  extravagances  in  the  Con- 
sulate, 155-157  ;  her  early  dread 
of  a  crown  and  a  divorce,  and 
her  wifely  warnings,  157-158; 
her  tearful  appeals  for  the 
Duke  d'Enghien,  165;  her  re- 
ligious marriage  with  Napoleon, 
172,  173;  her  coronation,  173- 
176;  her  last  journey  with  Na- 
poleon, 272;  her  doom  knelled, 
281;  more  extravagances  and 
debts,  293 ;  her  usefulness  to  Na- 
poleon, 293-295;  her  divorce  an- 
nounced, 295,  296;  Napoleon's 
settlement  on  her,  295,  296;  the 
divorce  and  parting,  297,  298; 
her  last  duty  to  Napoleon,  299- 
300;  her  attitude  toward  him 
after  his  second  marriage,  307, 
308;  her  gift  and  visit  to  King 
of  Rome,  312;  her  last  days  and 
her  death,  400,  401 ;  Napoleon's 
parting  tribute  to  her  memory 
before  surrendering  to  England, 
451. 

Jourdan,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 


247,  248;  his  tomb  in  the  Inva- 
lides  at  Paris,  487. 

Junot,  General,  with  Napoleon  at 
Toulon,  33;  accompanied  Jo- 
sephine to  Italy,  54;  in  battle 
at  the  Horns  of  Hattin,  100; 
his  expedition  to  Lisbon,  266 ; 
surrendered  to  Wellington,  268. 

Junot,  Mme.,  her  vengeful  mem- 
oirs,  153. 

Kellermann,  General,  his  charge  at 
Marengo,  130. 

Kleber,  General,  in  the  campaign 
in  Galilee,  100,  101 ;  leading  the 
last  attack  on  Acre,  104;  his 
tomb  in  the  Invalides  at  Paris, 
487. 

Keith,  Lord,  read  to  Napoleon  the 
sentence  of  banishment  to  St. 
Helena,   456. 

Kutusof,  General,  at  the  Battle  of 
Borodino,  337,  338;  abandoned 
Moscow,  340;  his  pursuit  of  Na- 
poleon on  retreat,  351;  his 
death,   366. 

Lab6doy6re,  Colonel,  surrendered 
his  regiment  to  Napoleon  near 
Grenoble,  422;  his  death,  452. 

Lafayette,  Marquis  de,  his  pro- 
test against  the  consulate  for 
life,  142;  at  Napoleon's  final 
overthrow,  449. 

Lallemand,  General,  parting  from 
Napoleon  on  the  Bellerophon, 
456. 

Lannes,  Marshal,  wounded  at  Ar- 
cole,  58;  wounded  at  Acre,  104; 
at  Ulm,  190;  in  Jena  campaign, 
220;  at  Battle  of  Friedland, 
236;  his  antecedents,  247,  248; 
at  Essling,  275;  his  death,  277. 

Lannes,  Mme.,  her  dialogue  with 
Napoleon,  289. 


INDEX 


513 


La  Rothiere,  France,  Battle  of, 
387. 

Laa  Cases,  Emmanuel,  Count  de, 
his  remark  to  Lord  Keith  on  the 
Bellerophon,  456 ;  receiving  the 
dictation  of  Napoleon's  "Mem- 
oirs" on  the  Northumberland, 
457 ;  accompanied  by  his  son  to 
St.  Helena,  461 ;  teaching  Eng- 
lish to  Napoleon,  462,  463;  ar- 
rested and  deported,  468;  his 
son  returned  to  St.  Helena  to  es- 
cort Napoleon's  body  to  France, 
485,  486. 

La  Tour  d'Auvergne,  first  grena- 
dier of  France,  "dead  on  the 
field  of  honour,"  188;  his  tomb 
in  the  Invalides  at  Paris,  487. 

Lavalette,  General  de,  his  escape 
from  prison,  452. 

Lavalette,  Mnie.  de,  niece  of 
Fanny  Beauharnais,  at  Jo- 
sephine's coronation,  175;  de- 
livered her  husband  from  prison, 
452. 

Lefebre,  Marshal,  husband  of  Mme. 
Sans  Gene,  won  to  Napoleon's 
plot  against  the  Directory,  112; 
captured  Dantzie,  236;  his  an- 
tecedents, 247,  248;  at  the  first 
abdication,  397 ;   his  death,  488. 

Leipsic,  Saxony,  Battle  of,  and  its 
field  to-day,  376-381. 

Leon,  Count  de,  son  of  Napoleon, 
290. 

Ligny,  Belgium,  Battle  of,  430. 

Livingston,  Robert  R.,  negotiat- 
ing for  the  purchase  of  Louisi- 
ana, 144-146 ;  in  a  stormy  scene 
at  the  Tuileries,  179;  declined  to 
interfere  in  Bonaparte-Paterson 
marriage  difficulty,  207. 

Lodi,  Italy,  Battle  of,  50-51. 

Lonato,  Italy,  Battle  of,  55. 

Louise,  Queen  of  Prussia,  rallied 
the  war  party  in  1806,  219;  her 


flight  before  Napoleon  from  Jena 
to  Memel,  226-229,  231,  232;  her 
statue  at  Tilsit,  238;  her  house 
at  Tilsit,  239;  her  visit  to  Til- 
sit, 242-244 ;  years  of  poverty 
and  sorrow,  245;  her  death,  her 
children,  her  tomb,  246;  her 
daughter  married  to  Nicholas  I 
of  Russia,  246. 

Louisiana,  its  sale  to  the  United 
States  by  Napoleon,   143-146. 

Louis  Philippe,  King  of  France, 
restored  statue  of  Napoleon  to 
Vendome  column,  253;  en- 
throned by  the  Revolution  of 
1830,  479;  brought  Napoleon's 
body  from  St.  Helena  and  buried 
it   in   the  Invalides,   485-487. 

Louis  XVI  of  France,  on  whose 
bounty  Napoleon  was  educated, 
13;  Napoleon  present  when 
King  was  mobbed,  28,  29. 

Louis  XVIII,  his  attempt  to 
bribe  Napoleon,  160,  161 ; 
wished  to  remove  Napoleon 
from  Elba,  414;  his  flight  from 
Paris  at  the  approach  of  Na- 
poleon, 424. 

Lowe,  Hudson,  in  the  campaign 
of  1813,  371:  commended  Water- 
loo as  battlefield,  437 :  chosen  to 
be  Napoleon's  custodian  at  St. 
Helena,  464 ;  his  iron  rule,  464- 
472 ;  refused  to  permit  Napo- 
leon's heart  to  be  sent  to  Marie 
Louise,  471. 

Liitzen,  Prussia,  Battle  of,  366. 

Macdonald,  Marshal,  his  ante- 
cedents, 247,  248;  at  Wagram, 
279;  swam  to  safety  at  Leipsic, 
381 ;  at  the  first  abdication,  397  ; 
fled  from  Napoleon  at  Lyons, 
423. 

Mack,  General,  defeated  by  Na- 
poleon at  Ulm,  190-191. 


514 


INDEX 


Maitland,  Captain,  his  reception 
of  Napoleon  on  the  Bellero- 
phon,  453-455. 

Malta,  conquered  by  Napoleon,  76; 
the  cause  of  the  great  Anglo- 
French    war    in    1803,    179. 

Mantua,  Italy,  captured  by  Na- 
poleon, 62. 

Marchand,  Napoleon's  valet  at 
St.  Helena,  469;  by  Napoleon's 
deathbed,  471;  returned  to  St. 
Helena  to  escort  Napoleon's 
body  to  France,  485,  486. 

Marengo,  Italy,  Battle  of,  127-134. 

Marie  Louise,  Empress,  her  first 
flight  from  Napoleon,  64;  in 
flight  again  from  Napoleon,  191; 
her  third  flight  from  Napoleon, 
274;  her  betrothal  to  Napoleon, 
299-304 ;  her  marriage  and  jour- 
ney to  Paris,  304-309;  birth  and 
christening  of  King  of  Rome, 
310-313;  surprised  by  Napo- 
leon on  his  return  from  Russia, 
360;  invested  with  the  regency 
in  1814,  385;  her  flight  from 
Paris,  392;  carried  off  to  Aus- 
tria, 400;  easily  alienated  from 
Napoleon,  409;  her  letter  on  Na- 
poleon's death,  477;  her  mor- 
ganatic marriage  to  Count  Neip- 
perg,  477;  her  opposition  to  the 
reception  of  Napoleon's  heart, 
477,  478 ;  her  neglect  of  her  son, 
480,  481;  her  third  marriage, 
483;  her  death,  483;  her  tomb, 
484. 

Marmont,  Marshal,  rescued  Na- 
poleon at  Arcole,  58;  at  Ulm, 
190;  his  antecedents,  247,  248; 
on  Napoleon  as  a  lover,  282;  at 
the  fall  of  Paris  in  1814,  393; 
at  the  first  abdication,  397 ;  de- 
scribed to  King  of  Rome  Na- 
poleon's campaigns,  476. 

Massena,  Marshal,  his  first  meet- 


ing with  Napoleon,  46;  his  ante- 
cedents, 247,  248;  at  Aspern, 
276,    277. 

Melas,  General,  defeated  by  Na- 
poleon  at  Marengo,   129. 

Meneval,  Baron  de,  succeeded 
Bourrienne,  162. 

Metternich,  Mme.,  receiving  Jo- 
sephine's proposal  that  Marie 
Louise  marry  Napoleon,  299, 
300. 

Metternich,  Prince,  plotting  to 
marry  Marie  Louise  to  Napo- 
leon, 299-302;  his  famous  inter- 
view with  Napoleon  at  Dresden, 
369,  370;  plotting  to  alienate 
Marie  Louise  from  Napoleon, 
409;  commissioned  by  Francis  I 
to  explain  to  the  King  of  Rome 
the  downfall  of  Napoleon,  476; 
master  of  the  Holy  Alliance, 
485. 

Moncey,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  at  the  fall  of  Paris 
in  1814,  393;  at  the  burial  of 
Napoleon  in  the  Invalides,  487; 
his  tomb,  487. 

Monroe,  James,  negotiating  for  the 
purchase  of  Louisiana,   144-146. 

Montalivet,  M.  de,  a  cotmt  of  the 
Empire,  282. 

Montchenu,  Count,  French  com- 
missioner at  St.  Helena,  466. 

Montenotte,  Italy,  Battle  of,  48. 

Montereau,  France,  Battle  of,  389. 

Montesquieu,  Mme.  de,  governess 
of  the  King  of  Rome,   313. 

Montholon,  Count  de,  joined  Na- 
poleon in  St.  Helena  exile,  456 ; 
his  attendance  at  Longwood, 
462;  by  the  death  bed,  470, 
471. 

Montholon,  Countess  de,  her  mar- 
riage objected  to  by  Napoleon, 
461;  returned  to  Europe  from 
St.   Helena,  468. 


INDEX 


515 


Montmirail,  France,  Battle  of, 
389. 

i       Moore,    Sir    John,    his    expedition 
against  Napoleon,  270. 

Moreau,  General,  his  victory  at 
Hohenlinden,  133 ;  declined  to 
enter  Bourbon  plot  against  Na- 
poleon, 163;  banished  to  the 
United  States  by  Napoleon,  104; 
in  the  campaign  of  1813,  372; 
his  death,  375,  376. 

Mortier,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  at  the  fall  of  Paris 
in   1814,  393. 

Moscow,  Russia,  the  burning  of, 
342-344. 

Mt.  Tabor,  Palestine,  Battle  of, 
101-103. 

Muiron,  Colonel,  with  Napoleon 
at  Toulon,  33 ;  died  in  defence 
of  him  at  Arcole,  58 ;  scene  com- 
memorated on  Arch  of  Triumph, 
254;  Napoleon  thought  of  tak- 
ing his  name  after  Waterloo, 
453. 

Murat,  Marshal,  with  Napoleon  in 
the  desert,  92 ;  his  marriage  with 
Caroline  Bonaparte,  157 ;  at  the 
Battle  of  Austerlitz,  200,  201; 
created  Prince,  215;  at  Battle 
of  Eylau,  235;  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  appointed  King  of 
Naples,  267;  seized  Rome,  279; 
at  meeting  of  Napoleon  and 
Marie  Louise,  306;  with  Napo- 
leon in  the  invasion  of  Russia, 
331;  on  the  Russian  retreat, 
357;  at  the  Battle  of  Dresden, 
374;  betrayed  Napoleon,  384; 
his  death,  452,  453. 

Naples,  Kingdom  of,  brought  to 
terms  by  Napoleon,  53;  bestowed 
upon  Joseph  Bonaparte  by  Na- 
poleon, 213;  its  crown  trans- 
ferred to  Murat,  267. 


Napoleon 

Birth    and   Youth 

Birth,  3,  4;  Corsican  revolu- 
tion, 4,  5;  the  subjugation  of 
Corsica,  6;  Napoleon's  mother,  6; 
his  foster  mother,  6 ;  his  boyish 
temper,  7 ;  his  birthplace  and 
Ajaccio  described,  7-11;  boy- 
hood battles,  11,  12;  at  school  in 
Ajaccio,  14;  at  school  in 
Brienne,  13-17;  learning  French, 
14;  his  hatred  of  France  and 
his  Corsican  patriotism,  16; 
Brienne  to-day,  17-19;  at  the 
Ecole  Militaire,  Paris,  19-21; 
Bourrienne,  his  schoolmate  at 
Brienne,  17;  Peccadeuc  and 
Phelippeaux,  his  schoolmates  at 
Ecole  Militaire,  20;  influenced 
by  revolutionary  philosophy, 
20;  examined  by  La  Place,  and 
his  low  standing,  21. 

In    the   Army    and    the    Revolu- 
tion 

Going  to  his  regiment  on  bor- 
rowed money,  22 ;  Valence,  his 
first  post,  described,  22;  as  sub- 
lieutenant, living  on  $20  a 
month,  22,  23 ;  his  first  sweet- 
heart, Mile.  Colombier,  23;  his 
reading  and  studies,  and  liter- 
ary efforts,  23-25;  his  devotion 
to  the  doctrines  of  Rousseau,  24  ; 
meditated  suicide,  24 ;  on  duty 
at  Auxonne,  and  his  privations 
there,  25 ;  advocating  the  revo- 
lution in  Corsica,  25 ;  promoted 
to  first  lieutenancy,  26 ;  secre- 
tary of  a  revolutionary  club,  26; 
lieutenant  colonel,  Corsican  na- 
tional guard,  26;  beginning  of 
a  life  long  quarrel  with  Pozzo 
di  Borgo,  26;  dismissed  from  tlie 
French    army,    26:    at   Paris    in 


516 


INDEX 


the  Revolution,  27 ;  restored  to 
the  army  and  appointed  captain, 
28;  his  first  active  service,  28; 
his  breach  with  Paoli,  28;  a 
Frenchman  at  last,  29;  ban- 
ished from  Corsica,  29,  30;  Cor- 
sican  loyalty  to  his  memory,  30. 

The  Man  on  Horsehack 

A  penniless  refugee  in  France, 
31;  at  the  siege  of  Toulon,  32- 
34;  brigadier  general,  34;  im- 
prisoned and  released,  35 ;  or- 
dered to  Turkey  and  dropped 
from  the  army  the  same  day, 
35;  the  revolution  of  the  13th 
Vendemiaire,  35-37 ;  his  meet- 
ing with  Josephine,  42 ;  general- 
in-chief  of  the  Army  of  the  In- 
terior, 43 ;  his  marriage,  44,  45  ; 
general-in-chief  of  the  Army  of 
Italy,  46;  his  plan  of  campaign, 
47;  with  the  army,  47;  his  first 
victory,  48;  his  first  treaty  of 
peace,  49 ;  a  love-sick  bride- 
groom, 49;  by  the  bridge  of 
Lodi,  50,  51;  acclaimed  "Little 
Corporal,"  51;  in  the  cockpit  of 
Europe,  52;  his  treaties  with 
the  Pope  and  the  King  of  Na- 
ples, 53 ;  rejoined  by  Josephine, 
54;  battles  of  Castiglione  and 
Lonato,  55;  his  narrow  escapes 
from  capture,  55;  defeated  the 
Austrians  in  the  Tyrol,  56 ;  re- 
treated from  the  Austrians  at 
Caldiero,  56:  Battle  of  Arcole, 
57-59;  Battle  of  Rivoli,  60,  61; 
capture  of  Mantua,  62;  invasion 
of  Austria,  62-64;  armistice  at 
Leoben,  64;  his  first  court  at 
Milan  and  Montebello,  65-69; 
handsomely  remembered  his 
mother  in  the  first  hour  of  vic- 
tory, 68 ;  his  dislike  of  the  name 
Napoleon,   69;    appointed   Bour- 


rienne  his  secretary,  69;  tear- 
ing down  thrones  and  setting  up 
republics,  70,  71;  the  loot  of 
Italy,  71;  the  Peace  of  Campo 
Formio,   72. 

In  the  Orient 

His  expedition  to  Egypt,  73, 
74;  the  voyage,  and  the  capture 
of  Malta,  75,  76;  eluded  Nelson, 
76;  landed  in  Egypt,  77,  78;  at 
Alexandria,  78,  79 ;  the  march 
to  Cairo,  79-81;  the  Battle  of 
the  Pyramids,  82-85;  his  fleet 
lost  in  the  Battle  of  the  Nile, 
86;  his  rule  in  Egypt,  87-90; 
his  project  for  a  Suez  Canal,  88 ; 
Sultan  of  Turkey  declared  war 
against  him,  89;  across  the 
desert,  91-94;  capture  of  Jaffa 
and  massacre  of  prisoners,  94- 
96;  advance  into  Syria,  97-99; 
Siege  of  Acre,  97-106;  Battle  of 
Mt.  Tabor,  101-103;  in  Naz- 
areth, 103;  his  retreat  from 
Acre,  107 ;  in  the  plague  hos- 
pital at  Jaffa,  107;  the  poison- 
ing story,  108;  his  return  to 
Cairo,  108;  Battle  of  Aboukir, 
108,  109;  his  flight  from  Egypt, 
109;  landed  in  France,  110;  tri- 
umphal progress  to  Paris,  110, 
111. 

The  Consulate 

The  situation  in  France  on 
Napoleon's  return  from  Egypt, 
111;  the  plot  for  the  overthrow 
of  the  Directory,  111,  112;  Na- 
poleon mobbed,  113;  cleared  the 
legislative  hall  with  grenadiers, 
113;  a  provisional  consulate, 
113;  the  scene  at  St.  Cloud,  113; 
reorganising  the  government, 
114,  115;  mourning  for  Wash- 
ington,   116;    stealing    into    the 


INDEX 


517 


Tuileries,  116,  117;  a  legacy  of 
war,  119;  fooling  Europe,  120; 
crossing  the  Alps,  118-126; 
planning  the  Battle  of  Marengo, 
127 ;  a  defeat  turned  to  victory, 
128-131;  Austria  brought  to 
terms,  133;  England  made 
peace,  133,  134;  habits  and  char- 
acteristics of  the  First  Consul, 
135-138;  reuniting  the  country, 
138;  restoring  religion  and  mak- 
ing the  Concordat  with  Rome, 
138-140;  formulating  the  Code 
Napoleon,  140;  elected  Consul 
for  Life,  141;  elected  President 
of  Cisalpine  Republic,  142;  La- 
fayette's protest,  142 ;  sale  of 
Louisiana,  143-146 ;  remember- 
ing old  friends,  147-149;  the 
consular  court  at  the  Tuileries 
and  at  Malmaison,  149-155; 
the  man  described,  154,  155 ;  "1 
am  not  like  other  men,"  157; 
his  advance  to  the  throne,  159- 
166;  Bourbon  bribes,  and  plots 
against  him,  160-166;  an  at- 
tempt to  assassinate  him,  161 ; 
betrayed  by  Bourrienne,  162, 
163;  more  Bourbon  plots  and 
death  of  Duke  d'Enghien,  163- 
166;  death  of  the  Republic, 
166. 

Emperor 

Proclaimed  Emperor,  168; 
"Putting  gold  braid  on  repub- 
licans," 169;  choosing  Charle- 
magne as  imperial  ancestor, 
170;  preparing  for  coronation, 
170,  171;  religious  marriage 
with  Josephine,  172,  173;  the 
coronation,  173-176;  crowned 
King  of  Italy,  176;  remodelled 
Switzerland  into  modern  repub- 
lic, 179;  stormy  scene  with  Brit- 
ish ambassador,   179,   180;   plan 


of  invading  England,  180-183; 
received  offer  of  steamboat  and 
submarine  from  Fulton,  180; 
long  struggle  to  conquer  Eng- 
land on  the  land,  184;  cause  of 
the  Napoleonic  wars,  185;  cam- 
paign of  Ulm,  186-191;  the 
Grand  Army  described,  187-190; 
entry  into  Vienna,  191,  192;  how 
Napoleon  chose  the  field  of  Aus- 
terlitz,  193-195;  his  plan  of 
battle,  196;  the  night  before, 
197,  198;  the  Sun  of  Austcrlitz, 
198;  the  victory,  199-202;  meet- 
ing with  Francis  of  Austria, 
203;  received  Venice  from  Aus- 
tria, 204;  imperial  matchmak- 
ing and  separation  of  Jerome 
and  Betsy  Paterson,  206-212; 
king  making,  213-217;  founded 
Confederation  of  the  Rhine, 
219;  conquest  of  Prussia  in 
1806-1807,  220-237;  Battle  of 
Jena,  221-224;  at  Sans  Souci 
and  the  tomb  of  Frederick  the 
Great,  224,  225;  freed  Polish 
serfs,  230;  Battle  of  Evlau,  233- 
235;  Battle  of  Friedland,  236, 
237;  the  Peace  of  Tilsit,  238- 
245;  his  marshals,  247-251;  how 
he  rewarded  them,  249,  250; 
marshals  contrasted,  251;  his 
ambition  and  plans  for  Paris, 
252-253;  laying  out  streets  and 
setting  up  monuments,  253-256 ; 
dealing  with  poor  and  unem- 
ployed, 256;  constructing  canals 
and  highways  for  the  Empire, 
257-259 ;  emancipating  the  Jews, 
259;  neglecting  popular  educa- 
tion, 259;  attitude  toward  art 
and  the  opera,  259,  260;  his  im- 
mense correspondence,  260;  his 
handwriting,  260;  dismissed 
Talleyrand,  261;  abolished  the 
Tribunate,     261;     his     finances. 


518 


INDEX 


261;  his  economies,  262;  his  re- 
wards for  all  kinds  of  merits, 
262;  his  consuming  energies, 
263;  his  despotism,  263. 

TJie  Empire  Waning 

Napoleon's  first  downward 
steps,  264;  his  decrees  against 
American  ships,  265;  his  over- 
throw of  Portuguese  throne, 
265,  266;  his  seizure  of  Rome, 
266;  appointed  Joseph  Bona- 
parte King  of  Spain,  266,  267; 
Murat,  King  of  Naples,  267 ;  his 
delusion,  267 ;  challenged  by 
revolution  in  Spain,  267-270; 
his  reunion  with  the  Czar  at 
Erfurt,  269;  entered  Madrid, 
270;  pursued  Sir  John  Moore, 
270,  271 ;  returned  to  Paris,  271 ; 
caught  between  two  foes,  272; 
his  Wagram  campaign,  272- 
279;  wounded  at  Ratisbon,  272; 
his  soliloquy  before  the  Castle 
of  Dernstein,  273,  274;  his  cap- 
ture of  Vienna,  274;  arrested 
and  deported  Pope  Pius  VII, 
279,  280;  his  peace  treaty  with 
Austria,  280,  281;  his  court,  his 
opinions  about  women  and  his 
relations  with  them,  282-291; 
son  born  to  him  by  Eleonore 
Revel,  290;  son  born  to  him  by 
Mme.  Walewska,  290;  his  reso- 
lution to  seek  an  heir ;  his  trou- 
bles with  Josephine's  creditors, 
293;  her  usefulness  to  him,  293- 
295;  announced  divorce  plan  to 
her,  295,  296;  his  settlement  on 
her,  296,  297;  the  divorce  and 
parting,  297,  298;  selecting 
Marie  Louise  for  second  wife, 
299,  300;  the  marriage,  304- 
309;  at  the  birth  and  christen- 
ing of  the  King  of  Rome,  310- 
313. 


The  Russian  Disaster 

Evil  influence  of  divorce  and 
second  marriage,  315;  his  dress 
and  manners,  315,  316;  his  au- 
tocracy, 316,  317;  his  work  fin- 
ished, 318,  319;  his  women  ene- 
mies, 320;  his  seizure  of  Olden- 
burg, 320;  his  estrangement 
from  the  Czar,  320,  321;  baffled 
by  American  ships,  321;  evil  ef- 
fects of  his  continental  system, 
321,  322;  his  attitude  toward 
the  church,  322,  323;  his  an- 
nexation of  Holland,  323;  his 
embarrassment  over  the  selec- 
tion of  Bernadotte  to  be  crown 
prince  of  Sweden,  323,  324;  his 
annexation  of  Swedish  Pomme- 
rania,  324 ;  his  successful  rule 
in  his  Empire,  324,  325;  his 
moral  deterioration,  325-327 ; 
his  fatalism,  326,  327;  again 
caught  between  two  foes,  328; 
his  departure  for  the  Russian 
campaign,  329;  his  congress  of 
sovereigns  at  Dresden,  329;  his 
army  of  invasion,  330;  crossing 
the  frontier,  330-332;  no  longer 
the  man  of  Austerlitz,  333; 
greeted  by  disasters  at  the  out- 
set, 333-335 ;  before  Smolensk, 
335,  336;  plunging  deeper  into 
the  wilds,  336 ;  at  the  Battle  of 
Borodino,  337,  338;  before  Mos- 
cow, 339-341;  the  burning  of 
the  city,  342-344;  souvenirs  of 
his  stay  at  the  Kremlin,  344- 
349 ;  his  retreat  from  Moscow, 
350-360;  "It  is  but  a  step  from 
the  sublime  to  the  ridiculous," 
359. 

Overthrow  and  Abdication 

"All  Cossack  or  all  republi- 
can," 361 ;  his  futile  struggle 
with  the  Pope,  363,  364 ;  raising 


INDEX 


519 


a  new  army  in  1813,  364,  365; 
his  Saxon  campaign,  366;  at  the 
Battle  of  Lutzen,  366;  at  the 
Battle  of  Bautzen,  367;  his 
grief  at  the  death  of  Duroc, 
368;  the  fatal  truce,  368;  his 
interview  with  Metternich  at 
Dresden,  369,  370;  England  his 
most  constant  foe,  370,  371;  end 
of  the  truce,  371;  at  the  Battle 
of  Dresden,  373-375;  overthrown 
at  the  Battle  of  Leipsic,  376- 
381;  his  unavailing  efforts  to 
raise  another  army  in  1814,  382- 
385;  liberated  the  Pope  and 
Ferdinand  of  Spain,  384;  his 
last  hours  with  his  son,  385, 
386;  at  the  Battle  of  Brienne, 
386;  at  Battle  of  La  Rothiere, 
387;  at  the  Battles  of  Champ- 
paubert,  Montmirail,  Chateau 
Thierry  and  Montereau,  389; 
repulsed  by  Bliicher,  390 ;  nearly 
overwhelmed  by  Schwarzenburg 
at  Arcis  sur  Aube,  390;  his  last 
card,  390,  391;  his  command  to 
save  the  King  of  Rome  from 
capture,  392;  racing  to  the  de- 
fence of  Paris,  393;  at  Cour  de 
France,  393-395;  at  Fontaine- 
bleau,  396;  abandoned  by  mar- 
shals and  servitors,  397,  398; 
his  abdication,  397,  398;  at- 
tempted suicide,  398,  399;  his 
farewell  to  the  Guard,  399;  his 
journey  to  Elba;,  399-400;  his 
exile  and'  reign  at  Elba,  and 
Elba  to-day,  402-412. 

The  Hundred  Days 

The  Allies  violate  Treaty  of 
Fontainebleau,  413,  414;  his 
flight  from  Elba,  414-416;  his 
landing  in  France,  416-418;  his 
march  through  the  Maritime 
Alps,  418-420;   joined  by  "Jean 


Valjean"  at  Digne,  420;  "Who 
will  shoot  his  General?"  421, 
422;  his  entry  into  Grenoble, 
422,  423;  into  Lyons,  423;  de- 
nounced as  an  outlaw,  423 ;  won 
Marshal  Ney,  423;  again  in  the 
Tuileries,  424;  the  lightning 
change  among  the  courtiers, 
425,  426;  his  army,  427;  fooling 
Bliicher  and  Wellington,  427, 
428;  going  to  the  front,  428, 
429;  his  fatal  hesitancy,  429- 
431 ;  at  the  Battle  of  Ligny, 
430;  his  first  sight  of  a  British 
soldier  in  twenty  years,  431, 
432;  at  the  Battle  of  Waterloo, 
432-446 ;  his  flight  from  the  dis- 
aster, 446,  447. 

In  Captivity 

His  final  dethronement,  448- 
449;  his  retirement  to  Malmai- 
son,  449-451;  debating  his  fu- 
ture, 450,  451 ;  preferred  to  sur- 
render to  England,  451;  his  re- 
jection of  plans  for  his  escape, 
451,  452;  his  last  step  on  French 
soil,  452 ;  his  reasons  for  pre- 
ferring to  throw  himself  upon 
England,  453;  his  appeal  to 
George  IV,  453;  his  surrender 
to  Captain  Maitland  of  the 
Bellerophon,  455 ;  his  arrival  in 
Torbay,  455 ;  in  Plymouth  har- 
bour, 455 ;  received  sentence  of 
banishment  to  St.  Helena,  456 ; 
his  companions,  456;  his  trans- 
fer to  the  Northumberland,  456; 
his  last  glimpse  of  France,  457 : 
his  life  on  the  yorthumberland, 
457;  his  first  view  of  St.  He- 
lena, 457;  the  islands  in  the 
voyage  of  his  life,  458;  St.  He- 
lena described,  458,  459;  his  life 
at  "Tlie  Briars,"  460 ;  Longwood 
described,  460,  461 ;   his  strange 


520 


INDEX 


court,  461,  462;  his  struggles 
with  the  English  language,  462, 
463;  his  good  relations  with  the 
English  at  first,  463;  his  feud 
with  Sir  Hudson  Lowe,  464-470; 
the  efforts  to  prevent  his  escape, 
465,  466;  his  defiance  of  the 
governments  of  Europe,  466, 
467  ;  his  gardening,  467  ;  his  dis- 
ease mistakenly  diagnosed,  470; 
his  last  hours  and  death,  470, 
471;  cancer  disclosed  by  the  au- 
topsy, 471;  his  burial  in  an  un- 
marked grave,  471,  472;  his 
body  conveyed  to  France  and  en- 
tombed in  the  Invalides,  485- 
487;  his  tomb  described,  487- 
489;  souvenirs  of  him  at  the 
Invalides,  487 ;  his  life  reviewed, 
490-493. 

Napoleon  II,  see  Rome,  King  of. 

Napoleon  III,  at  the  Battle  of 
Solferino,  56;  imprisoned  in 
Jerome  Bonaparte's  country  pal- 
ace, 214;  restored  statue  of  Na- 
poleon to  Vendome  column,  254; 
his  memorial  to  his  mother,  401. 

Narbonne,  Mme.  de,  her  disdain  of 
Napoleon,  285. 

Nazareth,  Palestine,  visited  by 
Napoleon,   103. 

Neipperg,  Count,  aided  to  alienate 
Marie  Louise  from  Napoleon, 
409 ;  became  her  morganatic  hus- 
band, 477;  his  death,  483. 

Nelson,  Horatio,  lost  an  eye  at 
Calvi,  30;  eluded  by  Napoleon 
on  the  Mediterranean,  76,  77; 
destroyed  Napoleon's  fleet  in  the 
Battle  of  the  Nile,  86;  lured 
away  from  Toulon,  182;  his  vic- 
torious death  at  Trafalgar,  191. 

Ney,  Marshal,  at  Ulm,  190;  at 
Battle  of  Friedland,  237;  his 
antecedents,  247,  248;  on  the 
Russian    retreat,   354-358;    mis- 


understood orders  at  Bautzen, 
367 ;  at  the  first  abdication, 
397;  ordered  to  capture  Napo- 
leon on  return  from  Elba,  but 
surrendered,  423;  at  Quatre 
Bras,  428-431;  at  Waterloo, 
442,  444-445;   his  death,  452. 

Nicholas  I  of  Russia,  married 
daughter  of  Queen  Louise,  246; 
his  sarcasm  on  the  tomb  of  Na- 
poleon, 488. 

Nile,  The,  Battle  of,  86. 

Norway,  annexed  to  Sweden,  384. 

Oldenburg,  Duchess  of,  her  bitter 
grievance  against  Napoleon,  320. 

O'Meara,  Dr.  Barry,  Napoleon's 
physician  at  St.  Helena,  461, 
462 ;  removed  from  Longwood, 
468. 

Oudinot,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248;  at  the  first  abdication, 
397;  his  tomb  in  the  Invalides 
at  Paris,  487. 

Palestine,  Napoleon's  campaign  in, 
93-96. 

Paoli,  Pasquale,  Corsican  general- 
in-chief,  5;  exiled  to  England, 
6;  his  breach  with  Napoleon, 
28. 

Peccadeuc,  Picot  de.  Napoleon's 
schoolmate  at  the  Ecole  Mili- 
taire,  20;  fighting  Napoleon  in 
1813,  372. 

Perignon,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248. 

Phelippeaux,  Napoleon's  school- 
mate at  Ecole  Militaire,  20;  op- 
posed Napoleon  at  Acre,  99;  his 
death,  103. 

Pichegru,  General,  in  the  school  at 
Brienne,  19;  in  a  Bourbon  plot 
against  Napoleon,  163;  com- 
mitted suicide,  164. 


INDEX 


521 


Pius  VI,  Pope,  his  truce  with  Na- 
poleon,  53. 

Pius  VII,  Pope,  makes  Concordat 
with  Napoleon,  138-140;  com- 
ing to  coronation,  172;  insisted 
on  religious  marriage  between 
Napoleon  and  Josephine,  172, 
173;  at  the  coronation,  173-176; 
declined  to  annul  Bonaparte- 
Paterson  marriage,  209 ;  his  car- 
dinals deported  by  Napoleon, 
266;  he  is  arrested  and  deported 
by  Napoleon,  279,  280;  political 
effect  of  his  refusal  to  annul 
Bonaparte-Paterson  marriage, 
322;  his  retaliation  on  Napo- 
leon, 322,  323;  at  Fontaine- 
bleau,  363,  364;  liberated,  384; 
appealed  to  powers  in  behalf  of 
Napoleon   at  St.  Helena,  469. 

Poland,  war  in,  1807,  229;  her 
serfs  freed  by  Napoleon,  230;  a 
little  strip  of,  gained  by  Russia 
at  Tilsit,  245 ;  grand  duchy  of 
Warsaw  formed  by  Napoleon 
and  bestowed  on  the  King  of 
Saxony,  245 ;  a  part  of  Austria's 
Polish  province  transferred  to 
Grand  Duchy  of  Warsaw,  280. 

Poniatowski,  Marshal,  his  ante- 
cedents, 247,  248;  with  Napo- 
leon on  'eve  of  Russian  cam- 
paign, 330;  drowned  at  Leipsic, 
381. 

Portugal,  Napoleon  and  Czar  de- 
termined to  close  her  ports 
against  England,  244;  her  royal 
familj'  banished  by  Napoleon, 
265,  266;  but  are  rescued  by 
Sidney   Smith,  266. 

Potocka,  Countess,  on  Marie 
Louise's  appearance,  304. 

Pozzo  di  Borgo,  Carlo  Andrea,  the 
beginning  of  his  life  long  quar- 
rel with  Napoleon,  26;  his 
twenty    years'    war    upon    him. 


327;  in  the  campaign  of  1813, 
372 ;  proposed  his  removal  from 
Elba  to  St.  Helena,  414;  at 
Waterloo,  434;  wounded,  446; 
his  last  thrust  at  Napoleon, 
466;  demanded  that  the  King  of 
Rome  be  forbidden  to  marry, 
475;  accused  of  plotting  mur' 
der  of  King  of  Rome,  478. 

Prussia,  disappointed  her  allies  in 
1805,  185;  indifferent  to  Ger- 
man patriotism,  and  trafficking 
with  Napoleon,  218,  219;  her  an- 
nexation of  Hanover,  and  war 
with  England,  219;  conquered 
by  Napoleon,  220-237;  dis- 
trusted by  him,  243,  244;  her 
dismemberment  at  Tilsit,  244, 
245. 

Pyramids,  Battle  of  the,  82-85. 

Quatre  Bras,  Belgium,  Battle  of, 
430. 

Rapp,  General,  at  the  Battle  of 
Austerlitz,  201;  his  blunt  retort 
to  Napoleon,   317. 

Remusat,  Mme.  de,  her  character- 
isation of  the  First  Consul,  152. 

Renaudine,  Mme.,  aunt  of  Jose- 
phine, who  arranged  her  mar- 
riage to  Beauharnais,  39;  ap- 
proved her  marriage  to  Napo- 
leon, 44. 

Revel,  Eleonore,  presented  a  son 
to  Napoleon,  290. 

Rhine,  Confederation  of  the, 
formed  by  Napoleon,  219;  its 
abandonment  of   Napoleon,   370. 

Richmond,  Duchess  of,  her  ball  on 
the  eve  of  Waterloo,  429. 

Rivoli,  Italy,   Battle  of,  60,   61. 

Robespierre,  Maximilien,  at  the 
height  of  power,  31. 

Rochefaucauld,  Mme.  de  la,  at 
Josephine's  coronation,  175. 


522 


INDEX 


Rome,  King  of,  his  birth,  christen- 
ing and  childhood,  310-314;  his 
last  hours  with  his  father,  385, 
38G;  his  flight  from  Paris,  392; 
carried  off  to  Austria,  400;  sepa- 
rated from  his  mother,  409; 
dreaded  by  the  monarchs  after 
Napoleon's  fall,  473;  a  prisoner 
in  his  grandfather's  palace,  474; 
his  name  changed,  474,  475;  cut 
off  from  succession  to  his  moth- 
er's duchy,  475;  plots  and  coun- 
ter plots,  475;  his  inquiries 
about  his  father,  476;  the  news 
of  his  father's  death,  476,  477 ; 
the  efforts  to  seat  him  on  his 
father's  throne,  478,  479;  his 
tributes  to  his  father's  memory, 
479,  480;  entered  Austrian 
army,  480;  his  death,  480,  481; 
his  tomb,  484. 

Roustan,  Napoleon's  mameluke 
body  servant,  with  him  in  Spain, 
269;  on  the  Russian  retreat, 
357 ;  abandoned  his  fallen  mas- 
ter in  1814,  398. 

Russia,  in  the  third  coalition,  185 ; 
demanded  England  recognise 
equality  of  flags  at  sea,  244; 
received  a  little  strip  of  Poland 
from  Napoleon,  and  permission 
to  take  P'inland  from  Sweden, 
245 ;  pushing  her  boundary  west- 
ward, 331,  332;  her  monument 
of  Napoleon's  campaign,  332 ; 
her  memorials,  at  Moscow,  of 
Napoleon's  repulse,  344-349;  her 
losses  in  the  Napoleonic  cam- 
paign, 359 ;  permitted  violation 
of  treaty  pledges  to  Napoleon  at 
his  abdication,  413,  414;  her 
commissioner  to  St.  Helena  re- 
buffed by  Napoleon,  466. 

Sardinia,  Kingdom  of,  made  peace 
with  Napoleon,  50. 


Savary,  General,  reporting  to  Na- 
poleon at  Marengo,  129;  watch- 
ing Bourbon  plotters,  163,  164; 
returning  from  Spain  with  Na- 
poleon, 271;  his  despairing  let- 
ter to  him  in  1814,  391;  parting 
from  him  on  the  Bellerophon, 
456. 

Saxony,  raised  to  a  kingdom  by 
Napoleon,  213;  received  grand 
duchy  of  Warsaw  from  him,  245. 

Saxony,  King  of,  host  of  Napo- 
leon on  the  eve  of  Russian  cam- 
paign, 329;  at  the  Battle  of 
Dresden,  375. 

Schwarzenberg,  Prince,  in  the  cam- 
paign of  1814,  385;  deceived  by 
a  Napoleonic  ruse,  388 ;  stag- 
gered by  Napoleon  at  Monte- 
reau,  389;  nearly  overwhelmed 
Napoleon  at  Arcis  Sur  Aube, 
390. 

Smith,  Sidney,  commander  of  Eng- 
lish fleet  at  Acre,  98;  taunting 
Napoleon,  105;  sent  European 
newspapers  to  Napoleon,  109; 
rescued  royal  family  of  Portu- 
gal, 266. 

Soult,  Mme.,  rebuked  by  Napoleon, 
283. 

Soult,  Marshal,  at  Ulm,  190;  at 
the  Battle  of  Austerlitz,  199- 
201;  his  antecedents,  247,  248; 
at  Waterloo,  435. 

Spain,  her  secret  transfer  of 
Louisiana  to  Napoleon,  143;  her 
royal  family  dethroned  by  Na- 
poleon, 266;  her  crown  trans- 
ferred to  Joseph  Bonaparte,  266, 
267;   her  revolution,  267-270. 

Stael,  Mme.  de,  her  dialogue  with 
the  First  Consul,  153. 

St.  Cyr,  Marshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248. 

St.  Denis,  Napoleon's  valet,  by  the 
deathbed  at  St.  Helena,  471 ;  re- 


INDEX 


523 


turned  to  St.  Helena  to  escort 
Napoleon's  body  to  France,  485, 
486. 

St.  Helena,  proposed  by  Pozzo  di 
Borgo  as  place  of  exile  for  Na- 
poleon, 414;  chosen  by  the  Brit- 
ish ministry,  455,  45G;  de- 
scribed, 458,  459. 

Stokoe,  Dr.,  removed  frora  Napo- 
leon's household  at  Longwood, 
468. 

Sturmer,  Baron,  Austrian  commis- 
sioner at  St.  Helena,  466. 

Sucliet,  ilarshal,  his  antecedents, 
247,  248. 

Suez  Canal,  Napoleon's  project  for 
its  construction  vetoed  by  engi- 
neers, 88. 

Sweden,  Napoleon  and  Czar  deter- 
mined to  close  her  ports  against 
England,  244;  Napoleon  con- 
sented to  Russia  taking  Finland 
from  her,  245 ;  Napoleon  an- 
nexed Swedish  Pommerania, 
324 ;  Bernadotte  chosen  heir  to 
her  throne,  323,  324;  annexed 
Norway,  384. 

Switzerland,  her  confederation  re- 
modelled by  Napoleon,   179. 

Taine,  Henri,  on  Napoleon,  260. 

Talleyrand,  Charles  Maurice,  dis- 
missed by  Napoleon,  261 ;  his  re- 
tort to  him,  288 ;  his  gross  in- 
sult, 317;  leader  in  the  Bourbon 
restoration,  395 ;  wished  to  re- 
move Napoleon  from  Elba,  414. 

Tilsit,  East  Prussia,  Peace  of, 
238-245. 

Tolstoi,  Count  Leo,  on  Napoleon 
in  Moscow,  344 ;  on  the  retreat 
of  the  French,  351. 

Toulon,  France,  Siege  of,  32-34. 

Trafalgar,  Spain,  Battle  of,  191. 

Turkey,  Napoleon  chosen  to  in- 
struct   her    army,    35;    nominal 


ruler  of  Egypt,  80;  declared  war 
on  France,  89;  her  partition  dis- 
cussed by  Napoleon  and  Alex- 
ander at  Tilsit,  240,  241. 

Ulm,  Wiirtemberg,  Campaign  of, 
184-192. 

United  States,  its  treatj*  with  Na- 
poleon in  1800,  143;  purchase  of 
Louisiana,  143-14G;  its  flag  the 
refuge  of  commerce  in  Napole- 
onic wars,  264;  injuries  to  its 
shipping,  265;  Embargo  Act, 
265 ;  its  ships  admitted  to  Rus- 
sian ports  in  defiance  of  Napo- 
leon, 321. 

Uxbridge,  Lord,  retreating  before 
Napoleon,  431,  432. 

Valjean,  Jean,  the  original  of  the 
character  followed  Napoleon  to 
Waterloo,  420. 

Vandamme,  General,  at  the  Battle 
of  Austerlitz,  201,  202. 

Venice,  invaded  by  Napoleon,  53; 
the  republic  destroyed  by  Napo- 
leon, 70;  ceded  to  Austria  by 
Napoleon,  72;  ceded  to  Napoleon 
by  Austria,  204. 

Victor,  ilarshal,  at  Battle  of 
Friedland,  237 ;  in  the  campaign 
of  1814,  385. 

Victor  Emmanuel  II,  at  the  Battle 
of  Solferino,  56. 

Victoria  of  England,  presented  to 
France  the  funeral  car  of  Napo- 
leon at  St.  Helena,  487. 

Vignali,  Father,  one  of  Napoleon's 
priests  at  St.  Helena,  469;  pray- 
ing by  the  deathbed,  471. 

Wagram,  Austria,  Battle  of,  278. 

279. 
Walewska,  Mme.,  presented  a  son 

to  Napoleon,  290. 


524 


INDEX 


Walewski,  Count,  son  of  Xapoleon, 
290. 

Washington,  George,  mourning  for 
his  death  ordered  by  Xapoleon, 
116;  his  biography  read  by  him 
on  the  Bellerophon,  454. 

Waterloo,  Belgium,  Battle  of,  432- 
446:   its  effect,  448,  449. 

Wellington,  Duke  of,  at  military 
school  in  France,  20;  his  cam- 
paign in  Portugal,  268;  fooled 
by  Napoleon  in  the  Hundred 
Days,  428 ;  his  army,  429 ;  at 
the  Duchess  of  Richmond's  ball, 
429;  at  the  Battle  of  Quatre 
Bras,  430;  at  the  Battle  of 
Waterloo,  432-446 ;  counselled 
moderation  to  Blucher,  450. 


Whitworth,  Lord,  in  a  stormy 
scene  with  Xapoleon,  180. 

William  I,  German  Emperor  and 
son  of  Louise,  229;  at  the  tomb 
of  his  mother,  246. 

William  II,  German  Emperor,  at 
Tilsit,  239;  dedicated  monument 
on  the  battlefield  of  Leipsic, 
377. 

Wurmser,  Marshal,  in  command  of 
an  Austrian  army  against  Xa- 
poleon, 54;  defeated  by  Xapo- 
leon at  Castiglione,  56 ;  defeated 
in  the  Tyrol  and  retired  in- 
to Mantua,  56 ;  his  surrender, 
62. 

Wiirtemberg,  raised  to  a  kingdom 
by  Xapoleon,  213. 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


npHE     following    pages    contain    advertisements   of 
books  by  the  same  author  or  on  kindred  subjects. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


Theodore   Roosevelt  :   The  Boy  and  the  Man 

Jieti  cloth,  gilt  top,  i2mo,  joo  pages  and  index,  illustrated,  $i.j;o 


WHAT  REVIEWERS  SAY 

"The  ideal  biography  of  Roosevelt." — New  York  Times 
Review  of  Books. 

**  Mr.  Morgan  has  rendered  timely  and  valuable  services. 
.  .  .  He  has  made  his  central  character  vivid  and  real."  — 
St.  Louis  Globe-Democrat. 

"  Considered  merely  as  a  piece  of  juvenile  literature  it  is  a 
capital  piece  of  work,  a  record  of  adventure,  daring,  and 
achievement  told  with  all  the  glamour  of  romance."  —  New 
York  Commercial. 

"  The  chapters  devoted  to  Roosevelt's  Western  life  are 
particularly  full  and  satisfactory."  —  Boston  Budget. 

"To  know  Roosevelt  through  the  medium  of  Mr.  Morgan's 
book  is  to  know  him  in  the  light  which  he  himself  would 
choose."  —  Philadelphia  North  Americaii. 

"  The  book  can  go  into  home  or  school  North  or  South, 
without  the  possibility  of  offence.  ...  It  is  especially  tonic 
for  high  school  youth  and  college  young  men.  I  doubt  if 
any  book  has  been  written  that  will  do  as  much  for  students 
as  will  this  story  of  a  real  life.  .  .  .  Buy  it,  read  it,  .  .  ,  and 
tell  others  to  read  it." —  Journal  of  Education. 


THE    MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


Abraham   Lincoln  :    The  Boy  and  the  Man 


By  JAMES   MORGAN 


With  many  interesting  portraits  and  other  illustrations, 
many  of  them  secured  for  the  book  from  private  collections 

Cloth,  $i.§o 

You  may  already  know  the  great  events  of  Lincoln's  life, 
but  you  will  still  find  this  simple,  clear,  straightforward  story 
of  the  early  hard  work,  the  slow  study  for  the  practice  of  law, 
the  single-minded  stand  "  for  the  Union,"  and  the  brave,  quiet 
facing  of  every  difficulty,  the  most  fascinating  record  of  any 
human  Ufe  which  you  have  known. 

The  Chicago  Tribune  says  of  it  editorially :  "  It  tells  the  life  stor}'  well. 
It  is  interesting.  It  is  well  written.  It  gives  the  significant  facts  one 
wants  to  know." 

"  No  young  man  can  read  Mr.  Morgan's  volume  without  learning  to  love 
Lincoln  for  his  homely  honesty  and  noble  ideals,  and  feeling  the  ache  in 
the  throat  that  the  whole  nation  felt  on  the  day  of  his  tragic  passing."  — 
Chicago  Record  Herald. 

"  Mr.  Morgan  is  much  more  than  a  faithful  compiler.  He  has  points  of 
view  of  his  own,  and  seizes  with  individual  judgment  upon  the  facts  worth 
while."  —  Literary  Digest. 

"  This  must  be  classed  as  one  of  the  very  best  of  the  many  books  upon 
the  subject  which  have  appeared  in  recent  years."  —  Boston  Transcript. 

"  Mr.  Morgan's  book  is  most  attractively  written,  and  unremittingly  en- 
gages interest  and  attention."  —  Philadelphia  Press. 

"A  masterly  composition  ...  a  volume  that  ought  to  be  in  everv 
American  home."  —  Professor  Shepardson,  Chicago  University. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


The  Life  Work  of  Edward  A.  Moseley 
in  the  Service  of  Humanity 


By  JAMES  MORGAN 


Cloth,  8vo,  $2.00 

This  is  the  story  of  a  government  official  who  quietly  turned 
what  might  have  been  a  routine  task  into  a  noble  service  on 
behalf  of  his  fellowmen.  Edward  A.  Moseley  was  Secretary 
of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  from  its  organisa- 
tion in  1887  until  his  death  in  191 1.  During  these  years  he 
was  ever  the  champion  of  laws  which  had  for  their  purpose 
the  promotion  of  safety,  justice  and  peace  on  the  railroads 
of  the  United  States.  As  a  pioneer  in  an  important  field  of 
ameliorative  legislation  his  work  and  his  papers  deserve  the 
attention  of  those  who  are  interested  in  the  development  of 
the  federal  power  as  a  regulative  agency.  The  narrative  and 
the  documents  of  his  long  and  successful  endeavour  before 
Congress  and  in  the  courts  are  significant  material  for  an  open- 
ing chapter  in  the  history  of  the  supervision  by  the  nation  of 
interstate  affairs. 


"  Deeply  interesting." —  New  York  Times. 

"  A  well-executed  piece  of  work." —  The  Dial. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


Important    New    Works    of    Biography 

Henry  Codman  Potter,  Seventh  Bishop  of  New  York. 
By  GEORGE  HODGES 

Cloth,  8vo,  Illustrated 

It  will  be  a  source  of  gratification  to  Bishop  Potter's  many 
friends  to  learn  that  the  preparation  of  the  official  biography 
of  Dr.  Potter  has  been  entrusted  to  Dean  Hodges  of  the 
Episcopal  Theological  School.  Long  conversant  with  the 
large  essentials  of  Dr.  Potter's  life,  his  training  and  sympathy 
have  been  such  as  to  qualify  him  to  do  the  task  well.  The 
biography  that  he  has  written  describes  Dr.  Potter's  career 
throughout  his  ministry,  especially  as  rector  of  Grace  Church 
and  as  bishop  of  New  York.  The  great  public  services  of 
Bishop  Potter  are  also  dealt  with  at  length. 

The  Life  of  Clara  Barton. 

By  PERCY  H.  EPLER 

Cloth,   i2mo.   Illustrated 

From  the  wealth  of  material  at  his  disposal  Dr.  Epler  has 
made  a  most  fascinating  biography.  Miss  Barton's  intimate 
friend,  he  has  supplemented  his  own  knowledge  of  her  with 
a  vast  array  of  facts  drawn  from  diaries,  correspondence  and 
reports  of  lectures  and  addresses.  It  has  been  his  purpose 
in  so  far  as  is  possible  to  let  Miss  Barton  tell  her  own  story, 
which  he  does  by  means  of  direct  quotations  from  her  writ- 
ings. The  result  is  a  vivid  picture  of  a  woman  whose  passion 
for  humanity  was  so  great  that  even  though  she  was  eighty 
years  old  she  went  "to  the  front"  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Spanish  War.  Her  whole  remarkable  career  is  reviewed 
from  her  school  teaching  days  through  the  battlefields  of  the 
Civil  War,  of  the  Franco-Prussian  War  and  of  the  Spanish 
War,  to  her  death  in  191 1. 


THE  MACMILLAX  COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


Important  New  Works  of  History 

History  of  the  Norwegian  People. 

By  KNUT  GJERSET,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Norwegian 
Language,  Literature  and  Histor}'  in  Luther  College. 

Cloth,  8vo,  Illustrated.     In  two  volumes 

This  is  a  history  of  Norway  from  the  earliest  times  to  the  present, 
in  which  the  author  shows  the  social  and  cultural  growth  of  the 
nation  as  well  as  its  economic  and  political  development.  In  the 
first  volume  he  traces  the  origin  and  early  years  of  the  race  and 
its  progress  as  a  united  and  sea-faring  people.  He  describes  in  an 
interesting  way  the  deep  and  permanent  influence  which  the  Norse- 
men exerted  on  Scotland  through  their  extensive  colonisation  there 
— their  settlements  in  England,  and  the  parts  they  have  played  in 
English  commerce,  their  occupation  of  Ireland  and  the  fate  of  their 
colonies  on  the  adjacent  islands.  In  the  second  volume  he  treats 
of  the  decline  after  the  first  period  of  national  greatness,  the  rise 
of  the  Norwegian  democracy  and  the  new  development  under  the 
national  constitution  after  1814.  A  brief  chapter  regarding  Nor- 
wegian immigration  to  America  and  the  life  of  the  Norwegian  peo- 
ple in  this  country  is  also  included. 

Economic  Origins  of  Jeffersonian  Democracy. 

By  CHARLES  A.  BEARD,  Author  of  "An  Economic 
Interpretation  of  the  United  States,"  etc. 

Cloth,    8vo 

The  publication  of  Professor  Beard's  Economic  Interpretation  of 
the  Constitution  two  years  ago  marked  the  beginning  of  a  new 
period  in  historical  writings  on  American  politics.  The  funda- 
mental conclusions  of  that  volume  have  been  accepted  in  the  latest 
historical  work  covering  the  period  of  the  formation  of  the  Con- 
stitution. 

The  new  volume  on  Jeffersonian  democracy  is  a  fresh  treatment 
of  the  period  from  the  formation  of  the  Constitution  to  the  estab- 
lishment of  Jeffersonian  democracy  in  power.  It  brings  together 
for  the  first  time  the  economic  elements  in  the  party  conflict  and 
treats  that  conflict  as  growing,  in  the  main,  out  of  the  antagonism 
between  rising  capitalism  and  agrarianism. 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


*  ••>  Vi 


AA     001374  933       8 


3  1210  00301    2026 


